A Chance Drunken Marriage
by The Final Conduit
Summary: In the aftermath of the battle of Haven, Jaune goes out drinking to get his mind off his worries. He wakes up the next morning a married man. What life would have him believe is that he not only married Weiss, but is in a marriage-shifting time loop. What REALITY would have YOU believe is that it's Emerald, hiding behind an illusion, to save face. Oh dear.
1. Hangover, part Jaune

The first thing Jaune realized he felt was that he in the midst of feeling a splitting headache, the sound of someone pacing the room and muttering to themselves worriedly filling his ears.

He groaned, forcing himself to get up after a few moments, and the sound stopped after abruptly after this, his blue eyes fluttering open to take in the scene in front of him.

"Weiss…?" He asked, seeing the young woman standing in front of him, her eyes widened in silent shock.

She stared silently at him, and he looked to her in turn, a few quiet seconds passing before Jaune realized that he laid naked in a bed he didn't recognize, covered only by a sheet.

"…!"

He immediately panicked, acting with instinct to cover his body up to his chest with the sheet.

"Uh, Weiss!" He exclaimed. "I'm sorry, I –"

His headache seemed to worsen at the sound of his own voice, and he audibly groaned to himself in pain as he grasped his head.

She seemed to show an amount of pain at his voice as well.

"Please… Don't yell." Weiss said, groaning.

"Sorry." Jaune said, blinking from the darkness of the room. "I didn't mean to end up here, however I… ended up here."

He tried thinking back, but gradually realized that he didn't remember anything.

His initial thoughts were jumbled, yet when his mind finally connected the dots, he was sent into a newly panicked state, the first quelled only by his hungover mind (he remembered that he tried drinking for the first time yesterday, out of curiosity more than anything else, but he was quickly learning how much he regretted this decision, like every other idiot move he made upon reflecting on it), but the second having no loud sounds to break his emotional state.

"U-Uh… Weiss?"

The woman looked to him slowly, seeming to struggle with concentration as much as he was in that moment.

"Do… Do you remember me coming inside of here last night?" Jaune asked softly.

Weiss frowned, and he tensed instinctively, continuing.

"I'm sorry," he said, "I just… I don't remember much from last night." Jaune said. "Everything's all jumbled up…"

Weiss' expression softened.

"I…" She averted her eyes, not meeting his. "I don't remember anything either."

"Ah."

Jaune was unsure what to say, him trying his best not to let his mind run afoul of what he imagined was happening.

"The most I remember is… me going to a bar to try drinking."

"Why were you over there to begin with?" She asked him.

"Honestly… I just had a lot on my mind lately, and part of me just wanted to see what it was like to drink. I don't really get the appeal though. It tasted sort of gross at first, when I wasn't used to it. It was like trying black coffee for the first time."

"Really?" Weiss asked, quirking an eyebrow, looking around. "Like... what exactly?"

"It's… Just how things have been since we got to Haven. I guess you probably don't get this right now, but things have been really hectic lately. After what happened to Professor Lionheart, and then us fighting Cinder and the others… It's made me think back to a lot of things. Like… How much I miss Pyrrha."

Jaune looked down at his lap, expression flickering with sadness.

He shook the thoughts from his mind, trying to think to the present situation, unaware of how Weiss' expression changed.

"Not only that, but I didn't want to spoil the mood for you, Ruby and Yang meeting Blake again." Jaune added. "I thought it'd just be better if I just… left."

"Well… Uh…"

"I don't know exactly what we did." Jaune said, mindful of his nakedness still. "Sorry if I did something you'd regret. You're probably fighting the urge to hit me right now."

Weiss glanced away, sighing.

"This is my life now." She muttered under her breath, before looking to Jaune. "Look… Jaune… We're both adults. We… probably _did_ do… _things_ last night." She crossed her arms, frowning still as she found herself at a loss for how she ended up in this situation. "There might be a little problem down the road, but… Let's just focus on the bigger thing right now."

"The… bigger thing?" Jaune asked, heart sinking as he thought about the idea of her getting pregnant, knowing that if the deed had been done that this was probably the last thing they needed, given everything that was going on right now.

He wondered if HE were the unlucky charm of the group instead of Qrow sometimes.

Weiss, meanwhile, couldn't meet his eyes at the moment.

"Look at your hand." She said to him.

Jaune blinked, then slowly did so, his eyes widening in shock at what he saw.

"O-Oh… OH." Jaune said, him looking down at the wedding ring around his finger, before looking up at Weiss. "You… you aren't wearing a ring, are you?"

Weiss hung her head slowly, then nodded.

"Yes. I'm wearing a ring." She said, holding her head with her left hand, and it was then that Jaune saw the ring, now that he knew to look for it.

"So… So we…?"

"Yes."

"We got married." Jaune said, as though trying to tell himself.

"… Yes."

"… Hah." He forced a small laugh out, then looked up at Weiss. "I'm sorry, I keep dragging you and everyone down with dumb stuff."

Weiss shook her head.

"We can fix this." She said. "I just… try to get some rest, Jaune."

"But…"

"Please." Weiss' tone was firm, and Jaune fell silent. "I just… need time to think."

She turned without waiting for a response, leaving the room and leaving Jaune to himself.

"… Crap." He muttered to himself.

* * *

Outside the room, the illusion faltered the moment she closed the door behind her.

She released a heavy sigh, and in the next moment, Emerald plunked down on the floor in a large bunch of mental exhaustion.

"… Crap." She muttered, holding her head as she closed her eyes. "What do I do, what do I do…"

She had spent most of the morning after waking up before Jaune trying to figure out what to do about the situation she found herself in.

After quickly dressing herself up, she had paced the floors wondering what to do, what to tell Cinder when she woke up in the room next door, what to do when Jaune woke up and found he'd married Cinder's ally…

 _Fuck_! she mentally cursed to herself.

"Where did I go wrong?" She muttered.

Despite her saying this, she knew full well the answer, how she'd gone to a bar to try and get her mind off the fact that she'd barely, _barely_ saved Cinder from Raven when the fighting broke out at Haven, only to find herself drinking too much against her better judgement.

Did people even HAVE access to their better judgement when they were drunk?

She was too much of a mess mentally to know the answer, since the damage was done anyways.

"This is too much. I didn't sign up for all this when I joined up with Cinder."

Between the plan to get the Relic falling apart, her and Cinder getting separated from Mercury and Hazel, and now THIS…

The back of Emerald's head made a thunk-like sound against the door.

"… Crap." She repeated.

* * *

 **A/N: This is my take on the whole "Drunken Arc Marriage" thing that's sort of cropped up.**

 **I sort of got tired of reading these stories and Jaune always ends up getting drunk in the first place because his friends usually go off on him about something, which usually doesn't align with the characters as far I can tell.**

 **I prefer the idea of him getting drunk because he's trying to get his mind off of how Cinder tried to kill Weiss just to spite him, how in hindsight it could've been avoided if he kept his cool (something he got on Ren about before when they fought the Nuckelavee), how Lionheart was revealed to be a traitor, in addition to the other things that happened between Volume 4 and 5.**

 **In relation to that bit I just mentioned, I like to imagine the night going something like Ren finding Jaune in the bar after a while of searching, and then they talk about how Jaune lost his cool when he saw Cinder, and how angry it made him about everything she did.**

 **Understanding what went wrong, Jaune tries apologizing for his own hypocrisy in how he yelled at Ren to stop when he went ballistic trying to kill the Nuckelavee, with Ren not holding it against him because he understands just how easy it is to lose yourself in your anger.**

 **Ren then goes on to say it's a lesson they both need to learn, not to lose their heads in those situations (especially when fighting powerful Grimm or people with Cinder's powers) and the two bros leave their little heart-to-heart with Ren asking Jaune if he wants him to walk him back home if he gets too drunk, but Jaune, for the sake of this fanfic's plot existing, tells him to go ahead, that he'd be fine.**

 **Pfft.**

 **We all know how THAT turned out.**

 **As for Emerald's part, this takes place in a different world where Emerald followed after Raven, Vernal and Cinder without them realizing it (she strained her semblance to mask herself from both of their vision), and, in the climax of the Maiden fight, just before Raven kills Cinder, Emerald makes an illusion that she tricked Raven with while using her chain weapons to grab Cinder and swing her back to safety before hiding while Yang took the Relic and Raven left.**

 **While cloaking them from Yang's sight on the elevator ride back, Emerald grabs Cinder (who by this point is knocked out from exhaustion) and tries making some type of getaway before Yang can get privvy to what she's doing and kill either her or Cinder (since, again, the latter's already heavily injured and Emerald doesn't think fighting _Yang_ of all people in a small spaced elevator, when her fighting style isn't suitable for a place like that, while Yang's IS, is the brightest idea to begin with).**

 **Also for the sake of this fic existing, Emerald tries using whatever lien she can pickpocket out to rent some type of room when she gets separated from Mercury and Hazel, and then, with everything that's happened leaving her REALLY stressed out, she tries going out to drink and ends up marrying a blonde dork knight in a drunken stupor.**

 **Truly a night to remember.**


	2. Dishnado

"We can USE this."

Of all the reactions Emerald expected Cinder to have, when of the former's recently changed marital status, these words were quite easily the LAST thing she'd expected.

With her mind needing a moment to comprehend this, Emerald only had one suitable response.

"Huh?"

"Think of it from a tactical standpoint. It's the _perfect_ position for you to glean information from him." Cinder said, smiling up to Emerald, her previous surprise at this development morphing into confidence.

"But… How do we know he even HAS information?" Emerald asked with mild hesitance.

She knew the thing Cinder hated the most was criticism (or signs of independent thought in general), but even with this knowledge, she could not help questioning this line of thinking.

For once, Cinder seemed patient.

"Even if he doesn't," Cinder replied, "assuming one of Ozpin's allies finds us, we have the perfect candidate for a hostage situation, in the worst-case scenario. We _will_ need to find a way back to Salem after all."

"But we can just take one of the boroughs or something out of here." Emerald said. "This is still Haven after all. Some people might even be willing to help us get away, if we pay them enough."

"Perhaps. Regardless, we can make the most of this situation, while it lasts." Cinder said.

"Is this even necessary though?" Emerald asked, frowning. "I'm already walking on thin ice as it is, just putting this façade up. I didn't even plan on it. How long until he starts suspecting something?"

"You managed to fool Ruby's team into trusting you." Cinder pointed out. "What's one little façade more to you?"

Emerald gazed at her, then mentally sighed.

She wasn't going to let her back out of this plan of hers, she thought.

Even if the circumstances were strange, Cinder was still recovering, so this would at least give her time, Emerald reasoned to herself.

"Alright." She said softly, nodding.

* * *

By the time that Weiss would return to the room, Jaune had already gotten up and dressed himself in the clothes he could find, after gathering them and showering, the months he'd spent traveling with his friends having numbed him to the luxury of wearing clean clothes each day.

He had walked and searched the room for a long while, and ultimately, when the door reopened and his newly married spouse reentered, he would look back to her.

"Uh… Hey Weiss." Jaune said to her.

"Hey there." She said, crossing her arms in mild discomfort at their current situation.

At least he wasn't nude anymore, Jaune thought, though this didn't extinguish the awkwardness he felt between them.

"You wouldn't have seen my Scroll around here, did you?" Jaune asked her.

"No, why?" Weiss asked.

"I can't find it." Jaune admitted, sighing.

"Oh… that could be a problem."

"You wouldn't have yours by any chance, would you?"

"No." Weiss said. "I don't know where mine is either."

This was a lie, Emerald knew this, but Jaune didn't, and she'd keep it that way.

"We're going to have to find a way back to Haven academy." Jaune told her. "I don't really know my way around this place though."

"We can always ask around for directions." Weiss replied, gently grasping her hands together.

"That could work." He nodded.

"Before that though. We… we have to talk Jaune. About… _This_."

She lifted her hand up, showing her wedding ring for emphasis.

"Right." He nodded, voice a bit solemn, but him not seeming surprised.

"What do we tell Ruby and the others?" Weiss asked. " _Should_ we tell them?"

"That… depends." Jaune said. "It would make sense to, but… I don't know. I know how annoying I was, looking back, when I tried bugging you about going out with me. So, of course, it wouldn't surprise me if you didn't want this sort of thing to... be a thing."

Weiss seemed to think over his words, then nodded slowly.

"We still have to worry about whether or not I'm… carrying or not now." She pointed out to him.

"I'm sorry." Jaune said. "I didn't mean for it to go this far. I didn't mean for it to go _anywhere_ honestly. I didn't think not remembering something would be so bad. I don't even _remember_ meeting you last night."

"It's a mystery to me too." Weiss frowned.

(Emerald imagined it would've been a much more explosive interaction if the two weren't so drunk that they decided to marry one another in their alcohol-addled minds.)

They fell silent after this, and Jaune wondered what to do then.

"Do you mind if I ask you something else?" Weiss asked.

"Sure. Go ahead." Jaune gestured for her to do so.

"Can you tell me how you and the others have been, while I was away?" Weiss asked.

(Emerald thought back to how Ruby, Jaune, Ren and Nora were traveling seemingly alone until Qrow intervened to fight Tyrian, how Weiss didn't seem to be there until some unspecified time before the fight at Haven.

This would have to do as an excuse for information, from the little she knew about Jaune from after the Fall of Beacon.)

"Uh… we've been fine." Jaune said. "But we already told you how things have been for us, didn't we?"

Weiss blinked in mild surprise, then nodded.

"Yeah, right. I just wasn't sure what to say." Weiss said. "It's hard for me to concentrate right now."

"It's okay." Jaune shook his head. "Do you think we should go soon?"

"Maybe. But there's… something _else_ I wanted to ask." Weiss looked to him. "I remember someone spearing me through with something. But not long after, I remember fighting like normal. You wouldn't know how I managed to do that, would you?" As though remembering something, she quickly added something for an explanation. "The memories from last night in general are really messy."

"That was… my semblance." Jaune explained to her. "I think it helped amplify your aura, so that's how you were able to recover. At least, that's what I think happened."

"I see." Weiss nodded slowly. "Let's have a go at asking around."

"Alright." Jaune began to walk out, and Weiss followed after him.

XxX

Despite their intentions however, when they tried to leave, they learned that the person in charge of the hotel had lent them the room for the time being.

"I wasn't sure exactly what to do with you two." The owner explained. "You two were both drunk, and I could barely make sense of what you were saying. With all the excitement from yesterday on top of that, I just didn't feel right not giving you the extra room."

"Extra?" Jaune perked up.

"Yup. You had a room already, one of you did at least," the owner replied, him looking to Weiss, who seemed to freeze up, "but… I guess you weren't in your right minds either."

"We weren't." Weiss sighed heavily.

"Would it be a stretch to say you don't have the money to pay for both rooms?" The owner said to them, and as the two looked to each other, Jaune rubbed the back of his head.

"I'm sorry, but I…"

"That's fine." The owner said. "If that's the case, maybe you wouldn't mind working it off for a day?"

"Are you sure?" Jaune asked.

"I am. I know it probably isn't the most orthodox thing to do, but I'd rather this than either of you getting attacked by a Grimm somewhere." The man replied, smile growing a bit weary.

Jaune thought about it, then nodded.

"Thank you." Weiss said, nodding to him.

"No problem."

* * *

The sound of faucets showering water over metal sinks and stacked plates filled her ears as she entered the back, careful not to let her semblance slip.

It was as they started to wash dishes of foods in the back kitchen of the hotel that Emerald heard Jaune start to talk.

"This really reminds me of how things were back home."

"Home?" Emerald looked to him while making a show of rolling up a pair of sleeves that didn't exist.

"Yeah. I have 7 sisters, so we'd always end up fighting over who had dish duty when the time came." Jaune said, inasmuch to help pass the time as it was him reminiscing, him beginning to go about cleaning dishes.

"Hm." Emerald hummed gently as she looked down at the dishes, beginning to clean them. "It must be nice, having a home like that."

"It is." Jaune said. "Sure, the days I spent with everyone traveling here was fun too, I see everyone as kind of like my second family, but… there's no place like home."

"It really depends on your definition of "home" though." Emerald found herself saying half-mindedly.

Jaune pondered her words.

"That's true too." Jaune looked over to her, then smiled. "But you at least think of us as a second family too, right?"

Emerald fell silent, and though she kept her illusion up, she smiled bitterly up to Jaune.

"I wouldn't know the first thing about having a first family." She told him honestly. "So… Maybe. I can't say for certain."

Jaune seemed taken aback by this, before looking forward.

"We all see you as part of the family, Weiss." Jaune said to her. "Even if we haven't told you, that's how everyone feels, me included."

Emerald became pensive.

"That may be true. But I think it shouldn't always be implied." Emerald said. "Even if it might be awkward, hearing someone _say_ they care is different than someone just acting like they do."

Jaune thought her words over, before nodding slowly.

"That's true. Maybe I should write everyone a letter." Jaune said.

"Even Qrow?" Emerald found herself asking with a glance over to him.

"Sure." Jaune said. "He DID save us when we were fighting that scorpion faunus guy. Though I'm still not sure what to make of him being able to turn into a bird."

"… Does he still carry his clothes and everything like that?" Emerald asked.

Jaune paused in thought.

"I don't know honestly." Jaune admitted. "I've never actually _seen_ him do it. But after everything we've seen of the world these past few months, I wouldn't be surprised if he did, somehow. Though now I'm wondering where it all goes, assuming that's how it works."

"Why don't you ask him in your letter?" Emerald asked jokingly. "It'll be an educational experience."

"He used to be a teacher now that I think about it." Jaune said. "I wonder how that went."

With this line of thinking, Jaune began to wonder how Qrow went about teaching, if his semblance made it so he couldn't stay close to someone without being a living bad luck charm.

"Do you think he'd have a bunch of pillows hang from the ceiling, and part of the training is that the students need to use their auras to sense when it falls to dodge it?" Jaune wondered aloud.

"Why pillows?" Emerald asked.

"I imagined some sword hanging over the seats thing, but that would probably be too dangerous." Jaune admitted.

Emerald tried to imagine it, sitting in a classroom with a sword hanging over a her head, poised to plunge itself down at her at any second.

She vividly imagined Mercury laughing at the dismay of any hapless student who barely dodged the sword in time when it fell on them.

"Yup." She agreed to his sentiment.

They continued to converse in such things for the duration of their time washing the dishes, with Emerald only excusing herself to go to the bathroom.

* * *

Upon reaching the inside of the lavatory area, Emerald finally let her semblance rest for a few seconds.

"I don't see this lasting very long." Emerald murmured to herself as she held her head.

Hopefully he didn't suspect anything up to this point.

Looking to herself through the mirror, Emerald found herself gazing thoughtfully forward.

"He isn't obnoxiously happy like Ruby and the others were, so at least it's more bearable." Emerald mused to herself.

* * *

Across the city, Ruby suddenly sneezed.

"Bless you." Ren said as he walked with her.

"Thank you." Ruby said, the pair continually looking for their lost friend.

* * *

 **A/N: Have you ever wondered what Qrow's lessons as a teacher at Signal would've been like, given his semblance?**

 **I'm just wondering how that would've gone.**

 **Part of me wanted to add in a conversation between Mercury and Emerald near the end, but I'm still sort of iffy on that part right now.**


	3. Too Late to Apologize

Emerald walked along with Jaune not long after working the approximated hours, and she realized very quickly that Jaune couldn't provide any information worth keeping the façade up for.

He had the same basic knowledge of RWBY that she had by the time the Fall of Beacon occurred, and this made Emerald frown in contemplation.

Deciding not to press too much into this information, she looked up to Jaune.

"You were pretty keen on asking if the hotel owner had your Scroll earlier." She pointed out. "Is there any reason for that?"

"Well..."

Jaune's expression became guarded, and Emerald raised an eyebrow.

"There's just... Something important to me there."

"Important how?" Emerald asked him.

"It's a secret." Jaune replied. "I'd rather not talk about it."

This, unsurprisingly, piqued her interest more, but she decided to not relay the fact that she had his Scroll, but had turned it off, to him.

She couldn't afford for him to call Ruby and the others, she had thought then.

Despite this, she was at a crossroads of whether or not to ditch him or not, as she imagined that he'd probably look for her at the hotel if nowhere else, and she'd probably cause problems eventually if she didn't do it right.

Emerald paused as they passed by a cavern filled with people playing and gambling.

Jaune quickly noted her actions, looking back to her.

"Have you ever done anything like that before?" Jaune asked as he approached her.

Emerald perked up, but didn't respond immediately.

"I'm above this sort of thing." She said, giving her Weiss impression despite knowing her semblance would do the job for her.

"Maybe you could try it, for fun." Jaune said. "I mean, everyone might stop talking about you being the Ice Killjoy Queen when it comes to this."

"What is with the ice puns with all of you?" Emerald questioned him, before pausing. "... Did Yang get you up to it?"

Jaune seemed to want to deny it, but his contemplative expression said it all.

"Yang is so bad at puns it hurts."

"She's better than me at doing jokes." Jaune shrugged.

"Even you can't be that bad." Emerald said in disbelief.

"Maybe. It's not impossible." Jaune shrugged.

Emerald stared at him, then looked into the cavern.

Screw it, she thought.

"I'll play a few games." Emerald decided as she walked inside.

* * *

Eventually, as Emerald stood in the gambling area with Jaune in tow, she looked to him as he marveled at her prowess in such things.

"Jaune, can I ask you something a bit... Personal?"

"Personal?" Jaune looked to her curiously. "Like what?"

"We are married now," Emerald felt discomfort at how quickly this fact settled itself as such in her mind, but didn't bring it up, "but we don't really remember anything from then. Right?"

Jaune's expression became a bit akward, yet he nodded all the same.

Though she felt a bit wrong about the matter, given how he was seeing her, she decided to follow through with asking her question.

"I know it might be weird talking about this, but can we head back to the hotel?"

He looked at her strangely, confused about why she would ask such a thing.

Reading the question in his eyes, she elaborated.

"We don't remember anything." Emerald said. "But I want to talk about that. Do you mind doing that?"

"Oh. Sure." Jaune nodded after a short stint of hesitation, head dipping itself lightly.

Emerald reached forward, gently grasping his hand in hers, him reciprocating the gesture not long after, with her pulling him along to get back to their destination.

When they arrived, Emerald questioned the rates for keeping the room for another night to the owner, and when she procured the money needed, he let them have the key to the room from before back.

Thanking him, the woman led him to the stairs.

"Hey, Weiss?" Jaune asked uncomfortably as she ended up stringing him along by the hand again.

"Yeah?" Emerald looked back to him curiously.

"What did you want to talk about?" He asked her.

Emerald slowed her pace, stopping at the top of the stairs to look back at him, before pulling him a bit down the hall.

She looked down the stairs and up the halls to make sure they were alone, before looking back up to Jaune, pulling her hand away from his, crossing her arms over her chest.

In spite of them being alone, the subject was awkward still.

"Jaune... Was yesterday your first time doing it with someone?" Emerald blurted out, deciding to go right out with it.

His eyes widened, face reddening vibrantly.

With a taken aback and embarrassed stammer, Jaune sheepishly admitted it.

"Y-Yeah, it was... my first time doing something like... THAT. I mean, assuming we even did it at all."

"We DID do it." Emerald said firmly.

"How do you know?" Jaune asked, though she knew from just looking at him that he wished she wouldn't be too convincing.

She was, unfortunately.

"Jaune." She didn't meet his eyes, her instead looking towards their door, recalling the hazy memories of how she woke up that morning. "I woke up with you in bed with me, both of us naked, with... _Stains_ on the sheets."

"That could've been sweat though." Jaune said. "People sweat a lot when they're drunk, among... _other things_."

"It smelled like a bit _more_ than sweat." Emerald bluntly rejected his meager defense against the idea of them doing the deed.

Jaune seemed to try and come up with another possibility - it was clear to her that he had been thinking of said possibilities for a long time - but Emerald's calm refutal, as with any act of botched confidence, rendered him momentarily out of steam to argue anything more convincing than jumbled mutterings.

She couldn't resist the urge to roll her eyes in annoyance at this.

She found mild annoyance with how he seemed to be treating the idea of doing it with her (he thought it was Weiss, sure, but that didn't spare her feelings any more).

He was treating it like it was the end of the world, with the same sort of denial she'd expect of someone who saw an air fleet's worth of Grimm Dragons take to the skies with the knowledge that every viable huntsman and huntress in the area had been assassinated, but refused to acknowledge their own impending doom as a defense mechanism.

"Look," she cut him off in his rambling after a few seconds of it, "let's just assume that, / _somehow_ /, we / _both_ / got drunk together, got / _married_ /, came / _here_ /, took / _ALL/_ our clothes off and / _slept/_ together for the night, and did absolutely NOTHING else." Emerald made a number of gestures with her emphasized words to denote the general "all-the-planets-aligned" chances of such a scenario being true. "Do you feel fine with just leaving your wedding night like that? Not even / _remembering_ / it happened?"

This gave him pause, and he frowned softly.

"Well... Maybe not." Jaune admitted reluctantly, his embarrassment clear as day.

"Neither do I." Emerald told him, holding her hips. "So... Whether or not we tell Ruby and the others about us, us being married, even if it's / _temporary_ /... why not make the most of it?"

Jaune gave her a strange look again.

"What do you mean?"

Emerald rubbed the back of her head, feeling a knot forming in her throat.

"Basically," she began slowly, "why don't we do a... do-over? So we can at least say our first marriage night, our first time doing THAT, wasn't a "drunken one night stand" sort of thing?"

Emerald felt her face burn up as she spoke, yet she found it necessary nonetheless to vocalize her thoughts.

Upon realizing what said thoughts entailed however, she mentally sighed.

This was her life now, she thought.

She couldn't help realizing the irony to be found in her situation.

The closest Emerald had gotten to ever having sex had been during the first time her semblance had manifested itself, when she had tried fighting off a group of men who'd found her in an alleyway.

That had been a few years prior, well before she met Cinder, but Emerald remembered it vividly.

Most times, when people would harass her at night, it would usually consist of them simply beating her up, guarded with the mindset that since she was homeless, it didn't matter what they did to her.

Though she knew her life wasn't ideal, it was still her life, and she adjusted accordingly to at least fight back when the opportunity afforded itself to her.

There wasn't much she could do in that moment in time however; the men had cornered her in an alleyway, and her recently acquired weapons weren't anywhere within her radius of reach, it only not being on her person then because the cops were driving around that night, and she wanted to avoid anything too unnecessary.

She'd really must have done something to piss off whatever fortune doling entity was in charge that night.

Though the men out numbered her the early teen girl, she still struggled, still acted to resist.

Yet something savage and primal seemed to unearth itself from her efforts.

She still recalled the smell of their alcohol tinged breathing, of their hands trying to pin her hands to the wall, of their collective laughter at her futile efforts, like predators sadistically pinning down their prey, /watching/ with heartless enthusiasm for the signs of learned helplessness to settle into her.

It was therefore extremely cathartic when she promptly thrust her knee into the crotch of the man pinning her, unaware her semblance had just manifested itself, her throwing him off of her before the confusion passed from his face, and the other men, equally confused from her subconsciously warping their perceptions of her, did not stop her from grabbing her hidden weapons.

Her mind, by then, had shifted into a full-on fight-or-flight response, and the guns, holding the firm reassurance that they would both protect her and harm her perpetrators, enhanced the impulse to fight.

The bullets shot the confused, drunken man several times, and by the time Emerald finally calmed down from the mixture of her adrenaline and her head-splitting headache, the men were nothing more than corpses laying crumpled on the ground, their blood pooling on the ground under her.

As quickly as she had become prey on the whim of these sadistic creatures called men, she stood over them with a smoldering cluster of emotions, among them the cold relief of momentary safety, to the rash, savage satisfaction in killing one of those same people who treated her as though she were their lesser because of factors beyond her control.

This was sharply juxtaposed with this situation, where she had lost her virginity the night before in circumstances she couldn't even remember beyond context clues that pointed to the obvious.

Since that night in that alleyway, Emerald had never been particularly fond of the concept of affection, even in jest, and the one person she'd decided she'd be fine with showing affection to, Cinder, never seemed to reciprocate any attempts Emerald made to show it.

She was therefore without any sort of exposure therapy, or whatever would be needed for her, to justify wanting what she wanted to do.

She had never expected this situation (how could she?), but over the course of the day, Emerald eventually admitted to herself that she wanted to at least make SOMETHING decent come out of this for her.

She imagined Jaune feeling much the same way, with the same amount of shame and embarrassment to be had from this type of circumstance.

She figured she was already doing something that was, for lack of a better description, VERY fucked up in impersonating his comrade to glean info out of him, so she might as well indulge herself in it instead of pussyfooting around what she wanted to get out of it, even if said wants involved her trying to do-over her own first time for the sake of her remembering.

She imagined Jaune would most certainly hate her when the truth inevitably cropped itself up, but from his comments about Pyrrha earlier, and how he'd made it no secret whatsoever how deeply he hated Cinder for her role in the fall of Beacon, she imagined this was about as warranted as could be due to it mainly being Emerald's fault it started at all.

The man in question seemed conflicted about her proposition.

"Are you sure?" He asked, his voice bringing her back to the present.

"I am." Emerald nodded. "You don't want to?"

He didn't meet her eyes again, running his hand along the back of his head.

"I just... figured you'd want to forget this ever happened." Jaune admitted, before looking up to her again. "Am I wrong?"

Emerald wanted to be honest, but though she ultimately decided to keep in character, her memories of team RWBY, and of Weiss Schnee's naïvely no-nonsense attitude in particular, she could understand where Jaune was coming from.

"Maybe you're right. But I can't." Emerald replied. Channeling her memory of Weiss, she added. "But my first time is still special. Even if it's with someone like you, I don't want to forget."

As she said these words, Emerald frowned, but not out of any particular act.

The words sounded like the sort of pompous, know-it-all "Pretend-I'm-Not-Interested-When-I-Am" attitude vibes she got from Weiss, but even if Emerald was putting on an act, she felt a level of something edging towards pity towards the person in front of her.

Even if he seemed like a bit of a dunce, he didn't seem like t _hat_ bad of a person to be around.

That being said, perhaps Emerald being one of the biggest reasons he suffered and watched his academy get overrun by the Grimm and the White Fang had something to do with that pity, not helped at all by how blatantly she was using him right now.

Jaune lowered his gaze, but smiled bitterly at her words, as though her putting him down didn't surprise him.

"Alright. I'll try to make it up to you Weiss."

Emerald glanced down, then turned, walking to and opening the door to their hotel room wordlessly, the sense of nervousness welling up under her stoic expression.

"Can you give me a second?" She said over her shoulder to Jaune as they stepped inside.

He nodded slowly.

"Sure."

He closed the door behind them as Emerald walked to the windows, her pulling the curtains over the windowsill, a blanket of muffled darkness casting itself through the room.

She turned to look back at Jaune, seeing him looking back at her, but quickly averting his eyes.

"Are you feeling nervous?" Emerald asked him curiously.

Jaune didn't reply immediately, but eventually relented, and was truthful.

"Yeah."

"That's fine." Emerald said, and though she wanted to say more, that she was nervous too, she refrained, her walking into the bathroom.

* * *

The curvy girl soon exited the bathroom, a hand over her large breasts as she walked to the form of Jaune as he sat down on the bed.

As she approached him, he looked up to find her already naked, her free hand grasping his shoulder as she leaned down, her gently pressing her lips against his as she closed her eyes.

Hesitantly, he returned the kiss before she broke it, her gazing into his eyes and his into hers, before she straddled herself down on his lap, her protecting her modesty by pressing her breasts into his bare, muscled chest.

The inexperienced pair laid down slowly, her on top of him as her arms wrapped around Jaune's neck, knees straddling him as his breath caught when she kissed him once more, his hands slowly moving up to grasp her sides, the woman gently pressing her cunt against his crotch, covered only by his boxers, and starting to slowly grind against him.

Their kiss broke, and the girl groaned under her breath as Jaune felt his manhood hardening from her actions, his mind swimming in light of how good her movements made him feel, him seeming to have trouble as well as she went about pleasuring both of them in this way.

"Hey," she said in a low, pleasured tone, and this caught Jaune's attention, "you can... Feel my body up more. It's okay, just for tonight. Please."

"O-Okay." He gulped down the lump in his throat, hands running their way up and down her sides, and she groaned, eyes closing as she felt this, before she reached down and grasped his right wrist, trailing it down and over her butt, firm in the years she'd spent growing stronger, and Jaune's face grew beet red as he felt this, his nervousness hitting its peak with this action.

"It's okay." She whispered down to him, as though to comfort him. "Don't think about anything else right now. Just... Try to enjoy this."

Jaune registered her words in his mind, and he nodded slowly, hand gripping the flesh of her rump in his hand before she felt him trailing both of his hands along her body, his previous hesitance forgotten as the lack of consequence led him to forgo his reservations.

A hand caressed her side, another her thigh, and in the midst of her feeling his manhood growing stiff and hard under his underwear, mixed with the heat growing within her womanhood, and the pleasure of their grinding privates, her mind grew hazy in her arousal.

She pushed down on his chest, sitting up as she pinned Jaune down, breathing coming heavily as she sat on his lap.

"Jaune..." She huffed her unsteady, breathy moan, and Jaune gazed upon her womanly form again, before he leaned up slowly, his hands grasping the sides of her head in his hands, him leaning closely to her, kissing her deeply.

She seemed to flinch at what he was doing at first, but after a few moments, she closed her eyes, leaning into the lip lock as it happened again, the kiss that was once awkward gradually growing more comfortable and relaxing.

Her movements ceased, her wrapping her arms around Jaune's neck in a manner that was somehow desperate, but for reasons she could not decipher, something curdling deep inside her as Jaune held her closely, arms wrapping snugly around her mid-back.

She broke the kiss for air not long after, breathing heavily, but her smiling gently.

"I'll need you to take it off." She said, and Jaune, understanding her meaning, nodded, her sliding off of him as he quickly took his boxers off of himself, the girl gazing down at his erection with curiosity that melded into shock.

"... It's big." She said with mild surprise, and Jaune gave a sheepish smile as he turned to her.

"... Tell me if it... Hurts." He said softly, and she nodded, laying herself down and spreading her legs apart for him, Jaune slowly crawling over her, and as he aimed his manhood, she suddenly pressed her hand against his chest.

"Wait... Could I... Be on top for this?" She asked, nervousness showing through to him for the first time.

Jaune paused, then nodded slowly, and the woman pressed her hands against his chest, guiding him onto his back as she mounted him once again.

This was somehow more comfortable for her, and she looked down at Jaune, her reaching down between her legs and aiming him up, the feel of her soft hands around his shaft making Jaune's breath come short.

The feeling of his member rubbing against her moisturized labia sent a faint shudder of pleasure running up her spine, and she eased herself into him, her having a faintly hard time adjusting to the feel as his length pushed its way into her, her reaching forward and grasping his shoulders for support.

Despite her lack of breath, she began to grind herself on his dick, low groans emitting from her throat as Jaune groaned in turn.

At some indistinguishable point in time, his hands grasped her hips, and with great strength, he began lifting and slamming her down on him repeatedly, their groans growing more breathy, her voice rising to small shrieks as his member scraped its way into her body, against spots that made her have a hard time containing herself.

His slams grew harder with every few seconds, and her eyes gradually rolled to the back of her head as her breasts began bouncing to and fro on her chest, Jaune grunting in those moments, until he instinctively leaned up, kissing the woman in his grasp as he kept lifting and slamming her down on him, the pair growing in their arousal as she wrapped her legs tightly around his waist without thinking, Jaune's eyes tensing as he turned them around, laying her down on her back as he stood on his two feet, him breaking the kiss and leaning his head into the crook of her neck as he began thrusting fast, rapid thrusts, their flesh clapping loudly as her moans grew louder and louder, the bed creaking under their shifting weight as she anchored herself to consciousness by holding onto Jaune, whose movements grew less controlled and more desperate with time.

"Jaune... Jaune...!" She cried his name, and this coaxed him to thrust himself into her harder and faster, trying to shove his dick as deeply into her as he could before pulling most of himself out before shoving himself back in, the tugging sensation of her tight vagina on him making his head go blank with pleasure as he continued to try and pleasure the woman under him.

Their bodies gradually secreted a layer of sweat, glistening in the faint light that seeped through the window curtains, and with the growing churning within her stomach, the woman gave long groans as Jaune began spearing his member into her, scraping repeatedly against a part of her that felt so good to her.

"R-Right there," she cried, the arm she had wrapped around his neck tightening, her nails digging into his shoulder blade as he kept scraping into her with a low grunt, her being driven over an unseen edge not long after, "r-right the-!"

Her body instinctively tightened around him as she gave an immodest cry as she was driven past her orgasm, the walls of her vagina clamping down on his manhood, and Jaune, despite trying to hold himself in, could no longer do so any longer.

With a loud groan, he thrust fully into the woman, dick pressed up against her womb entrance before hjs dick began to twitch and wriggle inside her, him cumming with her as they held one another tightly, his seed pumping into her as the two embraced, their pasts forgotten as natural instinct overtook them.

As the two breathed heavily whilst basking in their afterglow, they gazed into one another's eyes, a moment of silence broken by their haphazard breathing, before they leaned up to one another, sharing a deep, loving kiss as she grasped the side of his head.

As they pulled away a moment later, feelings that Emerald felt, but could not understand, surfaced and bubbled up within her, and she smiled up at Jaune as he smiled in turn.

"... Hey." She said softly. "You don't think... You could do it again, do you?"

Jaune blinked, then looked down.

"Uh..."

Emerald smiled gently, then kissed him again.

"I guess not?" She whispered. "That's fine."

Jaune slowly pulled his slackened member out, panting soflty.

"How was it?" Jaune asked. "For a... Do-over?"

She smiled.

"Pretty good." She chuckled.

* * *

Most of the time after this was spent doing it more, the many months they had both spent in training their bodies to be stronger making it much harder for them to grow tired, with only limited spans of needed to let them recharge enough to go again.

It was also during this time that Jaune experimented with his own aura, which, spanning the details, caused the time needed for him to "recharge" shorten dramatically.

In this way, Emerald decided that the time they had put into the room had been to good use.

By night fall, Emerald laid herself down in a sweaty heap on top of him, the sensation of sexual satisfaction quite a doozy for her to experience while still using her semblance extensively.

She panted heavily, eyes closed as she caught her breath, her looking up at Jaune and finding him resting.

Emerald chuckled lowly, then slowly peeled herself off of him, slipping from under her blanket to walk towards the bathroom, deciding to shower herself of her and fluids, her giving a soft sigh of what could've been relief since she didn't have to hide under her semblance any longer for that moment.

Once she finished however, she reclothed herself and found herself gazing at Jaune's Scroll, thinking back on the things he felt were so secret.

What could it be? she wondered.

Ultimately deciding to open it up, Emerald would wonder much later how much easier the next few days would have been if she hadn't let curiosity get the better of her.

There was nothing revelatory inside it; far from it.

Jaune was both open about this secret and not open at the same time.

For others, the most she imagined would result from learning it was some level of sympathy or pity.

For her, it brought to face the cold reality of just what she had done to him.

In those moments, all the satisfaction she felt turned into a writhing pile of disgust that welled up in her chest.

Memories of the nightmares that haunted her ever since that day flooded her mind, of the screams, of the wanton destruction, of all the people fleeing in helpless terror as monsters assailed themselves onto them.

"Ah... Ah...!"

The Scroll clattered against the floor, Emerald's hands shaking uncontrollably as the memories assaulted her mind, her grasping the sides of her head to keep it steady, and yet it became too much, all too quickly.

The sounds of heavy, frantic knocks on the locked bathroom door were the first things to alert her of where she was.

The concerned calls of Jaune to her through the door made her aware of how she had been screaming in repeated, frenzied wails over and over.

"Weiss!" He cried, the tone of concern he had so painful to her ears then.

"I'm sorry..." Emerald rasped weakly, shaking hands grasping her pained head in futile attempts to ease it.

She spoke it to one man, but her mind could not decipher what it had been that she was apologizing for.

There were so _many_ things to apologize for, and it did nothing to ease her mind.

"I'm sorry." She said, body convulsing and shaking. "I'm sorry..."


	4. Em in Weiss Clothing

When the door would finally be opened, it would only open slightly, and yet Jaune still saw the tear-stained face of Weiss, her shaking and shuddering.

"Weiss...?" Jaune's expression remained concerned, yet she shook her head.

"I'm sorry." Weiss said softly. "Did I... Wake you up?"

"Weiss, what happened?" Jaune asked her. "You were screaming."

He had never heard anyone scream so loudly, and she had done so with such abruptness that Jaune had a hard time reconciling just what had happened with what he recalled of her.

"It's... I just..."

She held her head, eyes downcast.

"... Are you... Having flashbacks?" Jaune asked her, unsure.

She looked up to him with questioning, and Jaune continued.

"Sometimes it happens to me. When I suddenly think back to worse times, and... I remember it a bit too well."

"What do you mean?" Weiss asked him. "By... worse times, I mean."

Jaune averted his gaze.

"The day when the Grimm flooded Vale and Beacon." He clarified, with audible difficulty. "I think about it a lot these days. While Ren, Nora and I traveled with Ruby, we came across a lot of barren villages. I didn't realize just how bad the situation was, when the Grimm came to Vale. I knew it was bad either way. But not just HOW bad. I do realize it in hindsight though. All those villages... They had people who had their whole lives ahead of them. And now they're gone. No traces of them anywhere. It's hard to swallow, but that's what happened to Vale that day. At least, that's what Cinder and the White Fang tried to do. I think back to that day, how many people died or got hurt, and... It gives me nightmares sometimes."

Weiss' gaze became down turned as he said this.

"I didn't know." Weiss said.

"Well, yeah. I try hiding it most of the time." Jaune said. "I don't wake up screaming or anything. But I still hate how twisted things can be. How anyone could ever WANT something like that to happen."

"That... explains some things then."

(Emerald thought back to his hate-filled rant to Cinder, how he showcased such a level of animosity to her specifically.

"Broken", he had called her.)

"So... It's okay if it hurts to think about. I think so at least." Jaune told her, before realizing his mistake in assuming. "I mean, if that's what you're going through. I don't want to assume."

Weiss frowned despite his words.

"I just..."

She seemed to be having trouble figuring out the right way to word it.

"I... I wish I did more." She told him. "All those people... They didn't deserve what happened to them. And in the end, I didn't..."

Jaune thought about it.

"Is it... Survivor guilt you're feeling?" Jaune asked her.

"... Maybe."

(It was a mixture of that and the sort of guilt that Emerald felt in general, she thought.)

"I know Ren gave the whole speech about it being a sign of growth," Jaune sighed, "but it's still hard not to think about the fact that you wished you could've helped more people, right?"

"You... I mean, we... We tried at least." Weiss said, as though trying to reason with him.

"I was mainly fighting the Grimm." Jaune said. "It doesn't make the guilt go away though."

She sighed gently.

"I wish I had done more for them. I wish... things could've been different."

(Thinking of the past, and acknowledging the guilt of conspiring to cause the deaths of so many innocent lives, Emerald understood that this was inherently different than the time she had killed those men in that alleyway.

There was truly no provocation or desperation to the Fall of Beacon.

There was only large scale destruction and slaughter, as casualties skyrocketed in minutes as the situation grew worse and worse.)

"You're here now." Jaune said. "You're helping to stop it now."

Weiss paused, falling silent.

"And, sure, you might not have been there always, but you were still sort of stuck in the situation at home, right?" Jaune asked her. "You didn't really have much choice."

"... I wish I could say that." She muttered.

"What do you mean?"

She crossed her arms.

"I mean... With my powers, maybe... I could have forced my way out, if need be."

She didn't seem truly convinced of herself, but said it regardless, and Jaune realized after a moment she was asking his opinion on her actions rather than taking a stance on her own.

"Maybe." Jaune said, playing along with her ruse. "But maybe you didn't realize you needed to at first. That's sort of the first step to making the right decision, right? Knowing there's one to make?"

He saw her eyes widen at what he said, her looking up at him speechlessly.

"... R-Right." She snapped her eyes away once she realized she was staring.

"And you made that decision." Jaune continued with a smile. "Even if you aren't at fault, I think that's sort of where the others went wrong. Raven and Professor Lionheart, I mean. They were given a chance, and... They didn't really take it. I don't know what happened, so I might be wrong. But you did."

"It might not be as simple as just making a decision though." She sighed.

"Well... Maybe." Jaune nodded. "I don't really know what else to say." He paused a moment to gather his thoughts. "If you're feeling bad about it, then you can try to make up for it by not letting more bad things happen, if you can."

"I see." She sighed heavily. "I'm sorry again, for waking you up."

"It's no problem." Jaune said.

"Could I ask you something though?" Weiss asked.

"What?"

"Are... You naked right now?"

"... Yeah." Jaune said with a level of embarrassment.

He had woken up to her screams, and hadn't wasted time trying to dress himself when she was probably hurting or worse.

"I'll be going out for a walk." Weiss told him. "To... Clear my head."

"Okay. Do you need to be alone?" Jaune asked.

"Yeah."

"I'll just... Get out of your way." Jaune slipped away from the door, and then Weiss came out and walked through the door, sighing gently.

"I'll see you later Jaune." She said as she left, and Jaune nodded, sighing as this happened.

* * *

As Emerald walked out of the hotel room, she sighed to herself as she pulled out Jaune's Scroll, looking inside at the contents.

At a purely surface level, what she'd found were a number of diary entries Jaune had been writing for some time.

What had brought her to the state she found herself in not long before was the fact that he was writing it in a letter format, all to the same person: Pyrrha Nikos.

As Jaune had said, he often carried himself with a façade that hid a much sadder person beneath it.

Many of his letters came out as though he was speaking to the girl in question, telling her of how his days went, though more often than not, Jaune would write of how greatly he missed her, how things had initially gone so wrong since Beacon fell, how it was so much harder just contacting his family and the others.

For a long time, Emerald had indulged herself with a mindset that she had already leapt past any sort of moral standards most could attribute to anyone, and she had found comfort in it, giving up any sense of responsibility beyond ensuring her own survival.

As someone without any form of family, with a hard grained instinct to survive by any means, Emerald had never truly known what it was like to have someone she loved or cared about.

The closest she could get was by living vicariously through the characters of different books, but even with this, she often found it to be little more than an enjoyable distraction from her day-to-day life of pick-pocketing people.

This had changed when she had met Cinder, but, truth be told, her feelings towards her were strange and complicated, things Emerald disliked, and as such, she never tried assessing them for fear of it being something she didn't like (or worse, something she DID like).

She was, however, not without a sense of guilt when she felt she had gone too far with her actions.

The Fall of Beacon was one such thing.

Before then, most of her actions were something she could put some kind of justification behind, ones she could be satisfied with at the end of the day.

Seeing the helpless citizens of Vale fleeing in terror as waves of Grimm monsters assailed them was something she could never justify to herself.

Something deep inside her implicitly understood she had already crossed the line several times already, so she figured she shouldn't be able to feel anymore.

That day had proven her wrong, though she eventually tried to forget.

The last five minutes or so had brought such things back to the forefront of her mind, with the guilt she felt for indirectly causing Jaune's friend's death, in addition to God only knew how many others, coming up in conjunction with the fact that she'd slept with the guy on top of that while disguising herself as one of his friends.

"Sheesh." She muttered under her breath.

For someone who was aware of the fact that she was a bad person, she sucked at being one, she thought.

She began trekking towards the nearest door to hers, her opening it up and entering to find Cinder standing with her ear pressed against the wall.

"... Uh... Cinder?"

The woman had already started wheeling around when she opened the door, yet upon seeing her, she stepped away.

"What happened?" Cinder immediately asked.

"What do you mean?" Emerald said.

"I heard you screaming inside there, but I didn't know exactly if it was a ruse or not."

"Uh... No." Emerald's cheeks grew hot with embarrassment, though her dark face made it hard to discern her flushed expression.

She closed the door behind her, then walked over to Cinder.

"Are you still recovering?"

"It's coming along." Cinder raised her Grimm arm hand, then looked back to Emerald. "How is it going so far?"

"I made it work, somehow." Emerald sighed.

Cinder glanced between her and the wall with a strange expression.

"What's wrong?" Emerald asked.

"It's..."

She crossed her arms.

"I'm curious about what you two did in there before this situation arose, but... I would rather not think of it."

"Does it bother you that much?" Emerald asked.

"Well, no, loss of virginity is a rite of passage for many people," Cinder's tone became uncharacteristically awkward, "and while it's good you did it while married, I... Don't know what else to say on the matter."

"Please don't say anything." Emerald hung her head.

"Alright. Could I ask one question though?"

Cinder rarely spoke to anyone, sans Salem, in a genuinely questioning tone unless they were needed, and Emerald acknowledged this rarity as she nodded.

"Did he notice it? Or did your disguise slip in the middle of the act?" Cinder asked.

"No. He wouldn't be acting like he did if I messed it up somehow." Emerald said.

"Very well." Cinder said. "Hopefully you used protection."

Emerald sighed.

"I didn't."

"Oh. Well, hopefully nothing too bad will come of this."

"Don't worry. This is the last time I'm doing it with him." Emerald crossed her arms.

"Really? Why?"

"It was just a one-time thing." Emerald told her. "I just... I don't know how to explain it."

"I see. Well, regardless, did you find any information from him?"

"Nothing we didn't already know." Emerald said. "I took his scroll from him though, to keep him from contacting anyone."

"Ah, that's right, we never managed to destroy the CCTV tower at Haven." Cinder realized. "Though, I doubt you'd need to worry about him contacting anyone. All four towers need to work for it to function right after all."

"Just being careful." Emerald said.

"I see. Can you tell me what happened today?" Cinder asked her.

Emerald nodded.

* * *

A/N: Part of me likes to imagine Cinder as being like Azula from that beach episode from Avatar, so she's this prideful force of nature to fight against, but the second things turn to romance or anything involving normal human behavior, she just flops and fails miserably.

Also, there seems to be a misunderstanding with the last chapter, where it seems like there's a multi-month time skip.

This is not the case at all.

The context of the situation is that last chapter, Jaune pushed his banana into Emerald's sacred cave, and the two had their fun with the concept until they were tired out.

While I originally intended to write out a long lemon, I figured what I made was good enough, and settled for skipping ahead a few hours, to when they're finally worn out.

As far as I know, sex doesn't normally last too, too long (as in, anyone who manages to keep an election for a long enough time to warrant a doctor's visit), but given the fact that I've written lemons for several years now (to put it in perspective: started in 7th grade and I'm about to finish my second year in college now at present) I've fallen into a niche, and I figured, between the superpowers, the emotion sensing monsters, the Cowardly Lion inspired character of RWBY getting killed by a demonic jellyfish, among other things, making it last a while would be fine.

However, I still wanted to explain it instead of just saying "Jaune schmoogled Emerald's gafloovity for a few hours", so I said that they got that level of endurance from the months of training they both went through prior to coming to that situation, since Jaune at the very least had been training with Pyrrha for some time before traveling at least a month between Vale and Haven (I don't think the show ever made clear how big a time gap there is between Cinder sinking Arkos and RNJR fighting a Golem knockoff with a flaming tree arm). I assume Emerald went through some training as well, mainly because of what I've seen of her actually fighting (even if it's three on one, you have to be strong SOMEHOW to fight a maiden to a standstill).


	5. Nightmare in Em's Suite

"Excuse me?"

The innkeeper glanced up to find Jaune standing on the other side of the counter.

"Everything alright?" He asked the young man.

"Uh... Yeah. I just wanted to ask if you saw the girl I came in with anywhere."

* * *

When Emerald opened the door again, she found Jaune sitting on the bed quietly, gazing at the window in thought.

"Is... That you Weiss?" Jaune asked over his shoulder.

She mentally sighed, having hoped to wait him out to see if he was asleep.

"It is." Emerald replied, walking back inside the room. "I'd thought you'd be asleep by now."

"I just... Wanted to make sure you were safe, before I did it. But I wasn't sure where you'd gone. I just... Waited here for a while."

How could a person be so obliviously good at making others feel like crap?

"Thank you." Emerald said, rubbing the back of her head. "I'm here now though. You don't have to worry."

"That's... good."

The air between them had notably grown more distant than before, and Emerald held her head.

"Will that be enough to let you sleep again?"

"Maybe. I wanted to know if you planned on leaving again tonight." Jaune said, yet he didn't look back to her. "Will you?"

"Not really. I'm tired." Emerald admitted.

"I am too." He said this with a weary tone, and laying in his casual clothes, he laid down, not facing directly towards her as he pulled the cover over himself. "Good night, Weiss."

"Good night." Emerald told him, and she watched his laid down form for a short while.

When she was certain he was asleep, she looked down to the sheathed sword that Jaune carried around with him, having gathered their weapons from the innkeeper, who (very tiredly) reported that they were in the midst of being much too drunk to use them responsibly, when he'd taken them and stored them away, along with giving them the keys to a free room.

Her guns tucked to the back of her hips, she carried the heavy sword into the bathroom, walking with careful steps as she gently pushed the door open with her hip upon seeing it slightly ajar.

As she entered, she eased the door closed while keeping a careful eye on the blonde knight sleeping on the bed.

She then the bathroom closet, careful with each step, taking wary glances at even the slightest sound of movement in the bed as she walked into the storage space of the closet, placed the family heirloom inside, then promptly stepped back out.

The task finished, she gave a small breath of relief.

However, she knew upon coming here that it was only a matter of time before it all fell apart.

Cinder had explicitly sent her to do this with this in mind, as the woman had explained in their brief time talking to one another that night.

At that time, Emerald relayed the fact that no valuable information was brought up from her attempts at gleening it off of him.

Despite this being the case, Emerald understood the lack of forethought Cinder had in many of her present decisions.

One idea that Emerald's mind erected was that the Grimm parts implanted in her body were gradually wearing on Cinder's psyche, and her current indulgence of her own sadism came as a result of these effects gradually overwhelming what little remained of her original humanity.

It was the only reason Emerald had to explain the weirdness of this idea, of this "plan", and when Emerald questioned it, at long last, the answer all but confirmed her theory to her.

"I only wanted to see him suffer, once he realized just what was happening. Even if vicariously, I wanted to know I caused him to suffer just a tad bit more."

Before hearing those words, it was a given that Cinder was a domineering, sadistic person.

Once Cinder had spoken this confession however, Emerald understood that dominance and sadism were words that could no longer fully describe who Cinder was as a person, what she had become.

Thinking on it now, Emerald understood then, better than ever before, that Cinder embodied the very definition of "needlessly cruel".

Tired and exhausted, she decided that she would tell the truth to Jaune, and, ideally, just get out of dodge before he could scramble to get his weapons.

(She doubted this would be the case, so much so she admitted to herself that it was naught but a pipe dream, and that was why she went about sitting in the currently locked bathroom as opposed to sitting in the bedroom, where it'd probably go South in an instant the second he saw her actual form.)

With this in mind, Emerald gently closed her eyes, mind drifting off to sleep.

* * *

"...?"

The girl awoke with sand under her body.

"Oh. It looks like you're awake."

Emerald's body felt heavy as this voice so to her, but as she pulled herself up, she looked forward, then blinked.

"Cinder?" She questioned.

"Did you expect someone else?" Cinder asked her, seemingly oblivious to the thing Emerald found so weird about it.

"Cinder... You're... A statue?" She questioned with quirked eyebrows.

"Why so surprised?" Cinder asked down to her. "You brought me something, didn't you?"

Emerald blinked, before slowly looking down, eyes widening greatly.

All around her, at her feet, countless carcasses sat strewn around her, their bloody, battered and broken bodies little the sands.

Then, for a split second, the forms of the carcasses distorted, warping into the shapes of human corpses, Emerald stumbling back in shock at this as they reverted to normal.

But then, as though the ground itself began to have its own heart, there came a pulse that rang steady under her, revealing the dead people around her repeatedly, her looking up to find that each pulse reverted the Cinder statue to her regular form, her stepping along the corpseland without anything more than a lumbering chuckle as she smiled at all of the carnage.

"You're really desperate for me, aren't you?" Cinder asked, looking down at her and seeming to find the sheer shock of Emerald's expression hilarious, even as her form shifted between her human and statue forms. "I appreciate all these people you've killed for me... But I can't help thinking you're not doing it for the right reasons."

She reached down towards Emerald slowly, the girl frozen stiff as the pulsing shifts in perspective reflected altering actions between the human shape of Cinder and the statue.

The human was trying to stroke her cheek, but the statue reached lower - to her neck.

Emerald felt her breathing constrict as the pulsing grew rapid, her emitting a soft whimper as fear settled itself into core, both sights of Cinder reflecting nothing but bottomless sadism for her pain.

"Don't be scared," she cooed down to her, yet the grip on Emerald's neck tightened, lifting her up into the air, "you killed so many people for me already. What's one more?"

The pulsing was hammering now, and Emerald whimpered again, clawing helplessly at the fingers serenely squeezing the life out of her.

Her voice sounded different, her hands no longer able to grasp at Cinder's fingers as they dug further and further into her skin.

Then, like the snap of a twig, her neck snapped under her grip, and Cinder let her now limp body fall to the ground like the rest, the pulsing of the ground now as still as her own body.

There only came the sound of faint laughter before Cinder spoke again.

"You'll be a nice fit here." Cinder said down to her, Emerald's corpse left to rot by the callous and sadistic statue that dismissed her death as another tool for her entertainment.

* * *

With a gasp, Emerald snapped up, hand grasping at her neck as she opened her eyes, looking around herself quickly.

For a moment, she wondered where she was, and how she got there, and it took a moment more for her to realize she had been sleeping.

There was a faint knocking on the door she laid against, and there was Jaune's voice, asking if she was in there, and if she was okay.

She rose to her feet sluggishly, holding her head as she tried to make sense of the dream she just had, her seeing the closed closet door and suddenly feeling a tightening in her chest.

"Can you answer me, if you're in there?" Jaune's voice asked.

She looked to the door, and she immediately fell back on reflex before even realizing it, despite the choice she told herself just the night before.

* * *

"I'm fine." The tired voice of the person inside said to him.

Jaune blinked, staring at the door in surprise.

"... Yang?" He asked in confusion.

"Y-Yeah... Who else?"

"When did you get in here?" Jaune asked. "Did you see Weiss?"

"Weiss? You saw her before?"

"Yeah. We were here yesterday and..."

"Aaand what?"

The door opened up, the blonde kickboxer leaning on the door frame casually.

The sight of Yang there made Jaune frown.

Something wasn't adding up right, he thought.

"Well..."

"Geez, did you go around telling people already?" Yang asked him, standing up and walking past him.

"Huh?" Jaune looked after her, and the one-armed girl raised her hand for emphasis.

"That we got married yesterday. Sorry that I slept in the bathroom, by the way," Yang turned to face him, raking her fingers through her hair, "I don't usually drink that much. Didn't want to make a mess on the bed."

She looked to the bed in question.

"... Well, more than we did."

Jaune flushed, him holding his head while his expression blanked.

This didn't make any sense! he mentally exclaimed.

"What's wrong? Got something on your mind?" Yang asked him, before a light smirk came to her face. "Y'mad I hogged the bathroom Vomit Boy?"

Jaune seemed to try verbalizing his thoughts and feelings, but he could only open and close his mouth while making half gestures to her and the bathroom.

"I'm gonna let you use it now, if you need it." Yang waved to him with her cybernetic hand, strolling out. "I won't be long."

She left the room without waiting for a response.

* * *

Silence filled the room behind her as she closed the door, Emerald staring forward for a few moments.

"What?!" Jaune's muffled yell came from behind the door, him finally verbalizing his thoughts and feelings in one word.

Emerald walked over to the wall opposite her and began thumping her head against it with self-frustration.

"Damn it, damn it, damn it me." She cursed to herself.

* * *

A/N: Yaaay, this story's one third of the way done, whoooo.


	6. Wedding Men: Days of Jauney Past

"Yang?"

"Yeah?" She looked over to Jaune as they stood in the midst of carrying a few plates over to the sink, him minding her.

"Did you... Rest well yesterday?" Jaune asked her, tone concerned as he spoke to her.

She thought it over.

"Eh. Not my best night's rest." She shrugged indifferently. "But it's not the end of the world."

Admittedly, after years of growing up as one of the homeless, Emerald was of the belief that she could make any place her bed without complaint, especially since she had adapted to even be something of a light sleeper who was a night owl (people were less likely to pull any crap during the day after all).

It was therefore a point of great confusion when she realized how stiff and uncomfortable her joints felt that morning.

Only after pondering this for the last several minutes of her life, wherein she had offered the innkeeper their help again with dishes, did she realize what had happened: She had grown accustomed to being taken care of by Cinder.

A lot of the simple luxuries people often took for granted, such as a warm, safe place to sleep, had been provided for her by the woman, and she had adjusted to one of her basic needs as a human being fulfilled, to such an extent that she briefly forgot how such cramps and the like were the norm for her some time ago.

How such details related to Jaune's question to her, however, seemed to be based around her seeming more tired than would be normal for Yang.

"Sorry that this happened." Jaune said. "I... Didn't mean for you to end up like this, because of me."

"Just... Forget it." She shook her head, placing the stack of plates atop the kitchen counter. "It was a just a... Weird mistake on both our ends."

Jaune frowned slightly.

"I wish I could REMEMBER it though." He said, irritation with himself clear.

She glanced over to him, mentally sighing.

Him and her both, she thought to herself.

"We drank a lot that night. I wish we could turn back time, stop it from happening."

"Yeah... Yeah." Jaune sighed as he began the process of clesning the dishes with her, him only pausing when he saw her helping.

"Do you think you should expose your arm to water?" Jaune asked her, and Emerald blinked.

"You think it's a bad idea?" She asked, making a show of grasping her hand.

From Jaune's perspective, the girl grasped her robotic arm's hand with a sense of worry.

"I don't know exactly how that thing works, or if it's water resistant," Jaune said, "but if you're not sure, I can handle the dishes."

She looked at him curiously.

"Are you sure?"

"Well... Yeah," Jaune said, running a soapy, water-laden hand along his blonde locks without thinking, "that was tailor made for you. I don't want to do anything to mess it up, when you just got it."

She seemed to consider it as she looked to him, before nodding slowly.

"Okay, if that's how you feel, go ahead."

She stepped away, going to the opposite counter and leaning against it casually, and Jaune went about washing the dishes.

Despite his putting up a façade of poise, Jaune was trying to process all of things that had happened since he'd come to that bar before.

Jaune was having a moment of reflection, and as would often accompany such moments, the familiar feeling of soul crushing regret festered inside of him.

The young man had seen many, MANY strange things in his life, especially since coming to Beacon, and though that only served to be one-upped every couple of days since nearing the end of Ruby's journey to Haven (capped by his apparently age-old Headmaster's ghost latching onto a kid while being a wizard from times of old), the current thing he was going through was something he struggled to truly make any sense out of whatsoever.

An old conspiracy thing, that worked in the shadows against even worse monsters than the Grimm? That was something he could understand.

The idea that his weird, sort-of creepy Headmaster was the head of said conspiracy, with their current leader against their enemies now living in the body of a kid half their age? He could comprehend it

The notion of his, and all mankind's, existence being the result of a couple brothers getting tired of having cosmic family feuds with each other? He could comprehend that.

The idea that he was such an idiot that he misread all the cues Pyrrha sent him about her feelings? That was so him it hurt to even think about.

There was a clear distinction between ALL of those things and what he was going through then however.

The distinction being that they were simple enough to understand, once he gave some actual thought to it, with it even being very simple when he put enough thought into it.

This, in contrast, made NO FLIPPING SENSE to him.

Once more, despite having established this to himself, Jaune cycled through the last day... Days... WHATEVER amount of time had apparently passed since the fight at Haven.

Yang had returned with the Relic, nearly got attacked by an injured Emerald and Cinder as they fled, everyone regrouped to make plans for going to Atlas later on, Jaune had left to try drinking his thoughts away, and then...

He simply woke up the next morning, naked and married to Weiss.

But then... It turned out not to be real, apparently? And he was actually married to Yang?

Had it been a dream? Jaune wondered.

It seemed too vivid and lifelike to be that - especially since he had apparently gone to sleep inside his own dream and slept.

Was that an actual thing in dreams, he wondered, having a dream inside of your own dream, as mind-screwy as it sounded?

But then... How could he have a dream that somehow predicted how his morning would go, even assuming that time he spent with Weiss was a dream to begin with?

Was his subconscious really so simultaneously advanced and base in nature, that he somehow predicted his own future before turning it into his own wet dream about Weiss, which then warped into some other weird thing of her screaming in a bathroom about survivor's guilt?

Was that all REALLY a dream?

It would be so simple to say that, yes, he DID just have a weird, future prophesying dream-thing about Weiss in some drunken stupor.

But then another conundrum made itself clear to him, one that Dream(?) Weiss had even specified to him: the fact that the bed he slept in was covered with the stench and stains of sex when he woke up, last he checked, which implied he had done the deed with someone there recently.

But something made no sense as he recalled one of Weiss' points to refute any belief that they DIDN'T do it in there, the fact that he was fully clothed after the fact without even a sign of his clothes being messy or anything.

Assuming it WASN'T all a dream, that he had spent actual time with Weiss and redressed himself after their "do-over", he understood it was feasible.

But then, HOW could it be possible, with the things he was experiencing now, with Yang being his wife?

This couldn't have been a practical joke, especially not at a time like this.

(Even considering that one time Ruby managed to get everyone to pretend she stopped existing for a week, when Weiss said something to that effect in one of her tirades against her leader, for the sake of messing with the heiress' head, this seemed too far-fetched even for Ruby's standards.)

That wasn't even mentioning his notable lack of a hangover, something that was present when he had his "dream", but not when he woke up that day.

Assuming that they had been drinking so much that they wouldn't even recall the wedding the next day (as he STILL couldn't remember that at all even then), Jaune seemed especially fine compared to what he probably should be suffering through, even in silence.

Thus, the resulting conundrums of his various observations made him mentally teeter on the edge of screaming his frustration to the sky, uncaring of what anyone would say, because he might as well be going mad with the mind-fuck that was his memory at that point.

On the outside however, despite the inner turmoil his mind suffered, Jaune was stoic and silent.

"Yang?" He looked over his shoulder at her.

"Yeah?" Yang asked behind him.

"Can you come with me later to try and find the bar we met inside of?" He asked her.

"Huh?"

"I'm just... Well... I wanted to figure out what exactly was going on." Jaune said, turning to face the woman and crossing his arms. "You said the innkeeper gave us the room last night because we were too drunk, right?"

"Uh... yeah." Yang nodded.

Just like in the "dream", Jaune thought.

"I wanted to try going out to see if we can get the story from him. He'd probably have a better idea of it than we do."

"I see..."

Hearing the slight edge to her tone, Jaune spoke uncertainly.

"Do you think it's a bad idea?" Jaune asked her.

"No, not really."

"What's wrong?" He asked, genuinely curious.

She ran a hand along her golden locks.

"I'm a bit scared we left a giant tab when we left." Yang told him, and Jaune wanted to give a rebuttal, but paused.

Given that he was currently washing dishes for a guy who had lent them a room out of common empathy for two drunken newlywed teenagers, he understood where she was coming from.

Unbeknownst to Jaune however, this reasoning was only a half-truth on his spouse's part.

For Emerald, the simple truth of the matter was that she didn't want Jaune to go there and realize her deception in such a way, as this would be liable to cause her to have the authorities on her back.

If he understood who he was, under the wrong conditions, it would only be a matter of time before she found herself in hot water.

(Again, she cursed herself for warping her appearance and façade without properly thinking it over that morning - at the very least, in the bedroom, she could go about knocking him out and getting Cinder if he found out there.)

As she thought about her present condition though, she wondered something, and for a moment more, she hesitated.

"Could I ask you something though?"

"Uh... sure. What?" Jaune asked curiously.

Emerald attempted to alter his hearing as she spoke.

"Can you pronounce the word "chrysanthemum"?"

He paused briefly, as though trying to process what purpose this could serve.

"Verification?" Jaune asked her, repeating the word he'd heard her say due to his warped sense of her.

"Good." Emerald nodded. "Thanks."

That was one base covered, she thought, glad her experiment with her powers was a success.

* * *

A/N: If anyone was wondering about Ruby screwing with Weiss, the background behind that was during the Volume 1 era, not long after Ruby became her team leader.

Weiss got mad at Ruby screwing something up, and eventually it boiled over into a tirade against her, something along the lines of how "air" would be a less annoying leader than Ruby as far as Weiss was concerned.

Ruby, hurt by this, ended up just entering a sulk corner, wherein Yang decided to cheer her sister up by concocting a prank to get back at Weiss.

This prank started out innocent enough, with everyone in RWBY (sans Weiss) and JNPR getting in on it by pretending Ruby had never existed, but that their actual team leader had been a person named "Air" whose semblance was to turn invisible.

In order to set up the prank, they went to Ozpin and had their team name rearranged to fit "Air" in as the team leader, and he agreed before decreeing it to all of the staff that they were not to pretend the joke lasted, then they went about taking out EVERY trace of her existence within reach of Weiss, including their custom-made bunk beds..

Of course, when Weiss experiences it, she just assumes Ruby's run off, so she goes and seizes her chance to be leader by going to Ozpin, explaining that since Ruby was gone, she should be her replacement.

Cue Ozpin asking if her team leader's semblance is going off again, and it just escalated from thereon.

People started realizing just what was happening, and it got to the point the entire school was talking about this "Air" person as though they were the single greatest huntsman prodigy in history, eventually treating this made up phenomena as their equivalent of Chuck Norris, and while some joked, others started asking Weiss, Yang and Blake if they could meet "Air" or not, and people just treated it as a ghost that roamed the halls in search of cookies and hot milk.

The prank was only supposed to last a couple days, but it got to that point in the space of a week until Ozpin, Yang and Ruby (who hid from Weiss daily) that it would be enough.

Then Ruby decided to try and get a wig and a whole new outfit for the sake of topping the joke off, and so she and Yang splurged on making Ruby look like a blue ghost wearing a Grimm skin over her back (they may or may not have "borrowed" it from Professor Port) while parading around the school proclaiming that she was Air's ghost daughter from the future come to tell of a great crisis that would befall them, something that could be alleviated if they donated to the cookie dough foundation.

After that, Ruby ditched the costume, came back to her dorm room, and pretended that absolutely nothing was wrong when Weiss came back and found her.

Then Weiss goes tsundere again and acts pissed off because she was worried about what had happened to Ruby, and Ruby, happy at this turn of events, lets it slip that Weiss really did miss her, which resulted in her putting two and two together and realizing it had been a ruse all along.

That was how Weiss began planning her revenge.

But that's a story for another time.

Simply know that Air was there at the Battle for Beacon, and was also there at the Breach.


	7. J and Illusion E Strike Back

When the pair would arrive at the bar in question, Jaune was beginning to sense that something was a bit off about the girl next to him.

Despite this, he had started talking to her about how he ended up going to the bar in the first place, relaying the whole story to her in a manner that made him feel like he was going through déjà vu, primarily due to him just telling Weiss the story in the past... The dream...?

Before. He had told Weiss the story already before.

As they neared their destination, he finished telling her of how Ren had talked to him before leaving him to his own devices, before asking her a question.

"What exactly led to YOU going there?" Jaune asked.

She looked up, seeing the bar, then ran a hand along her hair.

"I just... Had a lot on my mind." She said.

"Like what?" Jaune asked. "I thought you'd be happy, now that the group is back together."

She crossed her arms.

"It's more than just that." She said. "Just because I'm surrounded by friends doesn't mean that I automatically feel better about things."

(Though she'd said this, she mentally wondered if she would feel better if Mercury had been there.

RWBY and the others seemed rather tight-knit, and they seemed rather happier together than apart.

Would she feel the same if Mercury were here?

Probably not.

He'd probably just laugh at her expense, knowing him.

She could see it in her mind's eye now.

"How'd you get hitched with DORK KNIGHT of all people?" He'd probably say with great laughter, using the pseudonym he'd made up for Jaune in the span of time he'd spent trying to get to know JNPR.)

"So the stuff with Raven is still bothering you?" Jaune guessed.

She seemed to think it over.

"Maybe. Life hasn't exactly been the easiest, between Ruby running off, and then it turning out Raven was working with Cinder."

"I see." Jaune frowned. "We were just trying to help Ruby out when we left together. Sorry about that Yang."

She looked over to him.

"You didn't think I'd worry about her?" She asked, and though Jaune expected some level of anger come from this statement, he only heard curiosity.

It didn't spare his own guilt on the matter though.

"We figured it would make you and your Dad worry. Especially with everything that happened." Jaune admitted with a sigh. "It's no excuse for it, but we wanted to help Ruby out in getting here."

"What about your family?" Yang asked. "Why leave them to help Ruby? You know they're probably worried right now too, right?"

"Probably." Jaune sighed. "But Ren and Nora are my family too now. And so is Ruby, as far as I'm concerned. I know it's not the best thing to do, but... We had to do SOMETHING, to help."

Yang seemed to think it over.

"I guess it worked out. But you'll DEFINITELY have some explaining to do when you get home." She told him.

"Assuming I get the chance." Jaune said.

His casualness in saying this made her raise an eyebrow.

Seeing this, he looked away.

"Sorry. I've just been getting into more and more life or death situations. You guys are pretty good in a fight, but... I'm still pretty useless, in comparison." His mirthful chuckle made her frown. "I mean, losing my head like I did when I saw Cinder... I really messed up there."

(Emerald thought back to it, then mentally sighed.)

"I guess I'm not the only one with a lot on their mind?" She asked.

"I guess."

(Emerald glanced to the sky for a few moments, wondering briefly about her next words before speaking up.)

"Look, Jaune, you might be in over your head... But so are the rest of us, honestly. Just look at me. I thought it was a good idea to try jumping down between two Maidens and a Huntress with twice my experience. Anyone would think that's suicide." She told him.

"Not when it's you." Jaune replied simply.

"Even I lost a fight or two." She told him curtly. "But I'm still swinging. Not because I'm always sure every swing will be the one to SAVE THE DAY or whatever," she gestured her hands in a faux dramatic manner, "but... Because that's the path I chose in life. Not letting my fear control me."

(Though she understood that the entire act she put on as Yang was a lie, the false words she'd wrung up from her memories of the girl, meshed with this all being an attempt to cheer this guy up, made her chest constrict faintly.

Part of her thought back to Cinder, how she presented herself as an inflappable force of nature not to be trifled with the moment she got her Maiden powers.

She wondered, however briefly, if fear was a growing factor in her decision to stay with Cinder.

As quickly as this notion wafted itself into her mind however, another part of her mind laid the truth out bluntly to her: That her reasons for helping Cinder, even then, were much deeper than a surface level fear.

The reason she kept questioning it was simple: she just kept opting to ignore it, which barred her from fully understanding her feelings, thus creating a monotonous cycle of confusion that begot willing ignorance, and willing ignorance that begot more confusion.

Emerald, understanding such a blatant thing, did not deem this self-assessment to be untrue.

Instead, she did as she always did: She continued ignoring it.)

"I... I had the choice to fight for a world, without Salem or the others. And even if the odds might have seemed bad, I still chose that." She said to him.

"Yang... I know you're trying to cheer me up. But it's still something I have to face eventually." Jaune said. "I screwed up. And that screw up almost cost us one of our friends. I don't know what my role or purpose in this group is supposed to be. Part of me feels like I'm just dead weight dragging everyone down. Even with my semblance, there's no telling if that's going to change. So... The least I can do is try to avoid making dumb or rash decisions. That's what I realize now. I can't get better if I don't take a reality check. I may not be able to help you guys as much as I wish I could. But I want to at least be more than what I have been."

Yang gazed at him for a few moments, then nodded.

"Alright."

They stopped in front of the bar, and Jaune paused briefly.

"What's wrong?" Yang asked him.

"What you said before is getting to me again." Jaune said, before shaking his head. "But we have to face the consequences eventually."

He pushed his hand against the door, opening it up to go inside.

Walking inside, Jaune looked about at the seemingly empty drinking area, Yang strolling in casually behind him.

He stepped inside after her, looking about, but being unsure of what to say to get the answers.

Yang seemed a step ahead however.

"Excuse me?" She asked the bartender working then.

The woman glanced up at her curiously, but there seemed to be a level of recognition in her expression upon seeing her as his companion acted to question her.

(Emerald, understanding how vital it was not to mess this up, manipulated Jaune's hearing as she spoke to the woman before her.

"You wouldn't happen to know the person on shift here a couple nights ago, would you?" She asked.

To Jaune's manipulated senses, she made it sound like she'd said, "You wouldn't happen to know the person that was working here yesterday night, would you?" for the sake of keeping the illusion up.)

"Yeah. It was me." The bartender nodded, raising an eyebrow. "What brings you two back here? I didn't think you and your boyfriend would be here again."

"Well, we were just hoping to get an idea of what happened while we were here last time." Yang responded, crossing her arms over the counter.

"You... don't remember?" The bartender asked, surprised.

"No, no," she waved her hand with an air of nonchalance, before running a hand down her head, "we drank WAAAY too much. Neither of us really remember what happened after we left here."

The bartender gazed at her, then chuckled faintly, crossing her arms over her chest.

"You guys certainly left an impression." She said.

A pit formed in Jaune's stomach, and Yang's expression became a bit more tense, at the ideas of what could bring about such a response.

"What exactly do you mean by that?" Yang asked.

They were not prepared for what they ended up learning.

* * *

Two days prior to then, after the Battle at Haven had ended, the bartender was hearing a large amount of buzz from the nightly visitors.

She had accustomed herself to her shift in her time working there, and she recognized many different familiar faces of those that were in the area.

Some people didn't always come regularly, but she remembered those that did, along with how much people were able to drink before they got too drunk.

That night came in a blonde guy a bit younger than her decked out in armor and a sheathed sword on his side, over casual clothes.

"... Hello." She said placidly.

"Hello." He said in response. "Are... Weapons allowed in here?"

"Yeah, just as long as you don't use them." She said with a shrug. "Is this your first time around here?"

"Y-Yeah." He nodded. "I wanted to try drinking for the first time."

"Really?" She asked. "I wouldn't recommend it. It's not the best sort of habit to get into."

This hadn't been the first completely unfamiliar face she'd seen up to that point that night, though the other person, a dark skinned girl with lime green hair, had just asked how much the drinks cost there.

She was in the back of the bar drinking by herself at that point, and the blonde, in contrast, sat at the counter chair, asking what she recommended to him, and after serving a light drink, he notably didn't take it well but kept at it.

Someone eventually came and talked to the blonde, a rather pretty looking young man with raven black hair and a single magenta streak, and they talked about a number of things relating to guilt, fuck-ups and other pleasant stuff like that, after which the pretty boy left.

As the minutes ticked along, the blonde ran out of money, and the dark skinned girl from the boothe, seeing this, came to his aid and told him rather blaisely that she could tell he needed a drink as much as her, though she looked a bit intoxicated as it was.

The blonde's gracious answer was a befuddled, semi-drunken question of, "Wait, why are you here? You swung off through a window and left."

"I want a freaking truce." The lime haired girl responded, in clear recognition of him, and the blonde, having apparently thought it best to try and draw his sword out, took cautious steps away before the girl shrugged, then draw out her guns and aimed them at him, them poised to fight from this interaction alone.

The bartender, at that point, could only sigh briefly before leaping over the countertop and swiftly beating the crap out of them both, a feat made easier by their drunkenness.

Such was a bartender's duty, in a world filled with people who could use Semblances and the heightened emotional states, meshed with irrational thinking, leading to some measure of either very, VERY chaotic bar fights or Grimm suddenly attacking, events that would call for the sober bartender to intervene.

As such, two drunken teens did not warrant much difficulty in taking down.

After plaintively confiscating their weapons and sitting them down again, she told them, "Play nice," and gave them a couple drinks on the house, for the sake of giving them a reason not to sue in the morning more than anything else.

* * *

"... Plus it would help matters if either of you didn't remember getting assaulted in a bar." The bartender elaborated in her story.

"Why are you telling us this then?" Emerald questioned in confusion, her being careful to alter Jaune's hearing so he wouldn't realize she had been there that night.

"Because what happened that night was just TOO wacky for that to matter." The bartender shrugged.

* * *

As they accepted their drinks quietly, the blonde seemed to try putting on a semi-hostile front, but due to the green head not reflecting much care, he eventually just resigned himself to a truce, and the pair began talking to each other about what the bartender assumed was some work related thing.

The young man spoke at length about how he wished the whole mess they were dealing with would just roll over, and the young woman replied that she understood completely, that she "didn't sign up for this stuff".

They then proceeded to do a toast that was capped off with the exclamation "Fuck Salem!", coined by the young woman who coaxed the young man into following.

After their apparent truce and a toast to saying "Fuck Salem", their camaderie was much more apparent as they relayed a number of stories to each other, including a tale about how the blonde apparently worked at a bar at some point, only to find out that said bar was involved in the criminal underworld despite the club they operated in being legit.

How the blonde had found out was when the police kicked the door in to make an arrest, and the day of said arrest was when he tried having a party with his teammates to celebrate a hammer weilding girl's birthday, and she, in a batch of excitement, decided to try letting loose and fighting with the police while siding with the people Jaune was working with.

They all ended up getting arrested when a sufficiently trained officer arrived, but, on the bright side, the hammer user was happy about how her birthday turned out, so the blonde deemed it all worth it.

While recounting such stories of their lives, there eventually came someone running in to try and ask the bartender to help with a Grimm situation that cropped up, and the blonde seemed to perk up and say that he could probably help, that it would be his chance to redeem himself.

The bartender swiftly told him no, since he was drunk, and when someone else came in and volunteered to watch their weapons for them while she was gone, she nodded before going to the person asking for help to tell her to lead them along.

* * *

At this point, the memory came back to Emerald with a jolt as she remembered it, using her Semblance to trick the bartender into leaving the bar and their weapons unattended.

* * *

As they left however, the bartender quickly noticed that the pair were following her, weapons at the ready, and while she wanted, very badly, to just push them back inside, a Grimm situation was of more importance than a couple kids, so she just went along to where the commotion was happening.

As it turned out, the blonde and green head were pretty helpful despite being drunk.

Then it turned out that the blonde was a Huntsman in training, and as they returned, the bartender found that the person she'd left in charge was nowhere to be found, but since nothing of value had been stolen while she was gone, she just settled in and returned to her duties.

After that, the girl apparently dared the blonde to try hitting on her, and though she shut him down, she was unsure if she found more bemusement or flattery from the guy's attempts.

The girl then procured a lien card, and said she would give one of them a kiss if it fell to their sides.

The bartender, at that point, was so simply enamored with these people that she was just curious to see how it would end.

It ended up falling on the bartender's side, and when the green head tried leaning in to give the bartender a kiss, the blonde grasped her shoulder and told her, "No, you have to EARN it before you get that kiss."

When the bartender questioned why the green head had to earn it, he said that someone as amazing and pretty as her couldn't sell herself short, even if said green head was a pretty cool person too, if not for who she was working with.

* * *

Jaune had, by then, buried his face in his hands in embarrassment, groaning as he blushed at his drunken self's attempts at being either flirty or nice.

"Don't beat yourself up kid." The bartender snickered, obviously finding more enjoyment out of their expense at just how shocked they were by their own actions. "That was probably the nicest thing anyone's told me in a while."

Jaune hung his head, unable to look the woman in the eye, and smirking to herself, she crossed her arms.

"Do you not think so, now that you're all sobered up?"

"No, I don't take it back," Jaune admitted, "I just... This is so embarassing."

"Don't sweat it, nothing happened between me and your wife." She told him. "You certainly made sure of that."

"H-Huh?" Jaune asked, freezing over in fear.

The bartender smirked, before returning to her tale.

* * *

The first of the many contests was something he made her pick, and since these were still drunken teens a couple years younger than her she was dealing with, she made the first test something she knew they wouldn't be able to do.

She set a strip of duct tape down on the ground, and told the girl to walk on the line to the end.

Given her drunkenness, she failed miserably, and the bartender was content to let it end there, but then something seemed to light a fire in the girl's heart, who demaded a retrial.

Said retrial ended with her doing it almost perfectly, to her shock, and the girl looked to her hopefully, clearly wanting her kiss.

She relented, and then gave the girl a kiss on her forehead.

She responded by grasping her shoulders, then speaking softly, but firmly, "No. I want a REAL kiss."

The bartender was, simply put, shocked by this, and she looked away.

"I don't think it's right." She said.

"What's so wrong about it?" The girl asked, in a slurred flirtatious tone. "I can kiss this guy, no problem!"

And then she proceeded to do it without the slightest hint of hesitation.

* * *

"Oh... OH..."

Emerald held her face in equal embarrassment.

"And then guess what?" The bartender said.

"What did we do?!" Jaune exclaimed.

* * *

The blonde said he needed to be challenged for it.

After a bunch of tests that followed - during which the bartender got off work - the knight found himself mixed up in an illegal gladiator ring with a not too old Grimm, with nothing but his sword and shield on hand.

He won the ensuing fight, but it turned out that people were really betting on the drunk loser getting killed, so the three ended up fighting a bunch of hedonistic audience members until the person in charge, a shark faunus guy, got involved and gave Jaune the money owed to him for his victory.

Such was the case that when they finally left, the two went off on their own, and when the bartender finally found them again, they were already kissing rather fervently.

* * *

"Not long after, I led you guys back to your hotel and let you go in for the night."

"... When did we get married during all of this?" Emerald asked.

"Oh, how could I forget," the bartender laughed, "the Don said he had never heard of someone being so willing to get that kind of victory for the woman they love before. So he had you two married to a priest that was watching all the madness."

"What is a PRIEST doing watching at a gladiator match with Grimm monsters?" Jaune exclaimed in bewildered shock.

"Hey, mob bosses need people to pray to too." The bartender shrugged. "Glad to see you have the rings on still."

"Can you elaborate on the marriage thing at least?"

"I can't, honestly. Only members of the family get to watch. I didn't feel like stamping on their traditions, when, you know, there was already the induction ceremony and all."

"... I'm part of the mob." Jaune muttered quietly in realization. "I went out to drink, and now I'm part of the mob?"

"Ah... Yeah." She seemed to stop laughing at this. "Yeah... Sorry that I didn't do enough to stop it."

"Why Brothers why?" Jaune looked up to the ceiling and questioned the brothers who'd created humanity.

* * *

A/N: Drunk Jaune and Emerald are best Jaune and Emerald.

Also, if it wasn't obvious already, I decided to write it so that Emerald is bisexual here.

Hopefully you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

If anyone wants elaboration on the bar incident:

One day, Jaune decided to try and show his teammates how much he appreciated their friendship, and decided to collectively get them presents.

Despite this, Jaune lacked one very important thing: Lien.

So, determined to get the currency to buy his friends things, Jaune got a part time job as a bartender in Junior's club.

Due to the general level of incompetence Junior's men had, combined with Jaune being very bad at most of everything he tries hard at, and you get a recipe for people to bond over how much they suck.

They all collectively resolve to do better together, and what results is Jaune getting to be a part of the group as the bartender.

As everyone shares their life stories with each other, they learn of Jaune's struggling grades and resolve to help him improve, and it becomes a big back and forth with Jaune helping the guys with stuff and them helping him. One day, the guys learn that Jaune has a bunch of pals with him at school, along with a girl he has interest in, and they learn that he started working there to get his team presents.

Despite them all leading secret lives of crime, they're all rooting for Jaune to make something of his life, so in time, they try to help him study for stuff and learn to be romantic, which inadvertently leads to Jaune being lent a guitar to play for the girl he likes.

During ALL of this, Pyrrha, Ren and Nora are just wondering WHERE Jaune keeps running off to at night, so they all collectively decide to shadow him to his job, and from there they enter in the middle of the club scene.

They try to find Jaune, but Pyrrha gets separated from Ren and Nora (the latter of whom may or may not have pulled Ren out to the dance floor), leaving Pyrrha alone to wander through a crowd, only to find herself standing at the bar, where Jaune is at that point.

Jaune is completely shocked that Pyrrha's found him, and even more shocked his secret job has been discovered, but when Pyrrha, after over coming her own shock, tells him how worried they've all been, Jaune feels guilty and then sheepishly admits he wanted to get something special for them, especially Pyrrha, as thanks for the all the things she does for him, in addition to having such great friends.

As this happens, some of Junior's men see this conversation and how awkward Jaune is suddenly being, and they collectively assume Pyrrha is the one Jaune has eyes for.

From that point on, after the dance and the Breach happen, Jaune decides to plan a birthday party for Nora with Ren and Pyrrha when he learns that she doesn't know it herself due to how she grew up, and they set it for just after the big tests get hammered into them.

By this point, Junior's guys all see JNPR as members of the family, so they work it out with Junior to reserve a birthday party at the club for Nora, and they manage to hide it enough for her to be surprised and completely happy about it.

The night goes well, dances, birthday songs, gifts, and cake is passed around, and there's even a family photo done for the birthday girl with her family.

Many of you might be sad to know that Nora's birthday party got wrecked by the cops getting a warrant to arrest Junior and the others... Until you recall who Nora is.

What resulted is what you might imagine if Remnant followed GTA logic, where the cops just don't stop coming, in progressively more dangerous waves, and Pyrrha and Ren end up fighting Jaune and Nora to stop the latter's battle with the cops with Junior, the Malachite Twins and Junior's men all backing the fight.

Despite it ending in a massive clusterfuck, Nora couldn't have felt happier, because even if she went overboard, she really enjoyed being the Queen of her own little castle, surrounded by her family.

Jaune would give the gifts he wanted to give to his friends not too long after getting bailed out with everyone (the battle wrecked the place too much for any actual evidence to get dug up), and the guys would go on to cheer team JNPR on during the Vytal Tournament.


	8. Corruption

Emerald, over the course of the next hour, began to wonder if she'd somehow married the biggest trouble magnet of Beacon's former alumni.

She had formerly believed that Ruby was the most appropriate person for this role, and yet, in hindsight, she understood why this was wrong.

It was less that Ruby attracted trouble, but that trouble attracted the scythe wielder like an unseen sixth sense - at the very least, that had been the case while the 15 year old had attended there.

Jaune, on the other hand, seemed rather attracted to trouble, especially given that a night out drinking led to him being set up as a (potential) hostage, after marrying her in a drunken stupor.

She briefly thought back to Mercury, and wondered if he would find it either laughable or just ridiculous how thoroughly Jaune dug himself in.

In that moment in time, the pair sat quietly at a rather simple looking living room, some rather tall, built men and women standing about, watching the pair warily.

"I see, so you've come back."

The voice of the man speaking to them caught their attention, them looking up to him at once.

Rosario Franco was an aged man, the gentle features of his face enough to remind any less savvy person of a grandfatherly figure.

Wearing a dark suit and hat, he walked to the couch opposite of where Emerald and Jaune sat, a low coffee table sitting between them, him sitting down.

"I was starting to wonder when you'd show up." He wore a weary smile. "But you two seemed sensible enough, even when you were drunk."

The casual posture with which he sat contrasted to the stiffness of the pair sitting across from him.

"Hello," Emerald said, as respectfully as she could muster, none too gently prodding Jaune's upper leg to help him snap out of his nervous state, "sorry about coming out like this, but we needed to ask about what happened, the last time we spoke."

"Y-Yeah." Jaune nodded, clearly uneasy at being inside a room where mafia members were watching him, especially when he was sans his weapons. "Can you tell us?"

The man gave a wry smile, and Emerald braced herself to start altering Jaune's senses again.

The sensation of using her powers was always strange, but she was quickly learning that her current method of concealing the truth was that much more difficult to manage.

Maintaining illusions involved her willfully projecting an image from the intended target's perspective, something akin to magically linking her mind to their line of sight (which, for obvious reasons, gave her a splitting headache whenever she used it on too many different people).

Blocking and projecting differing sounds and minor sights wasn't too difficult for her, when she knew what to block and project, but while covering herself up as Yang, from Jaune's perspective, was something she found manageable, this steadily grew more complicated in the presence of others speaking to them.

She had to actively crane her ears out for details that could lead Jaune to suspecting anything, essentially censor out said details, and think up and replace them with details to cover her own ass, all at the same time, at a speed where Jaune wouldn't suspect anything strange.

The result was like hearing the world's most out of sync echo for her, hearing one thing while inventing another whenever necessary, making the experience that much more disorienting.

"You two came in a couple nights ago, talking about how you wanted a challenge." Rosario explained. "Your bartender friend was with you, talking about how you wanted to find something to prove yourself. Given how drunk you were at the time, we decided to turn you away... Or, at least we tried to. I had never seen a pair of kids drunk box like that before."

"Uh... Drunk box?" Jaune asked.

"You had a pretty strong right hook from what I hear. Knocked a couple guys down before they could even grab you, and even that didn't stop you. Then you talked about how you were a huntsman in training, and the pieces just fell together." Rosario mused, seeming rather bemused by Jaune's paling complexion. "After that, you said something about promises, and how you'd do anything to keep one you'd just made. As a man such as myself, that kind of conviction seemed almost admirable, if not for you knocking people out. But we relented, and set you in the ring for the night. Someone MAY have let it slip that you were drunk, and since it was just after another fight ended with us losing a lot of lien, it turned out you were our stroke of luck that night."

Jaune registered his words.

"You... Used me as a gambling pitch?"

"I wouldn't put it in those terms." He shrugged indifferently, Jaune's expression blank with shock. "You got all our money back anyways. All's well that ends well."

"So I won the fight... Then... People got mad?"

"Yup. At least, a few angry nuts were. You and your lovely wife took care of them though." He chuckled, and Jaune flushed, unsure if he felt more ashamed or embarrassed. "Then, when it was over, one thing led to another, and it was pretty obvious you were doing it all for her."

He glanced towards his companion, who seemed stiff as well.

"What did we do?" She finally asked, quiet.

"I'll spare you both the details." Rosario answered, shaking his head at the memory. "We were all in a pretty good mood, and your pal was talking about how he'd challenged yourself to this so he could be a better fit. It was a strange sort of thing, but you two seemed happy enough, and we didn't want to take responsibility for what you two might've ended up doing, if we left you both be. So, since you helped us get our money back, we got you hitched and gave you a dowry of some of the winnings."

"What?" The pair exclaimed in shock.

"Why would you do that?" Jaune asked.

"Where did the money go?" Emerald wondered.

"Because you both... Yeah." Rosario didn't go into specifics, but he made a gesture to them both that left a bad feeling in Jaune's gut, at least more than before. He then answered Emerald's question. "It should've been enough to cover you for a few days at any of the inns around here. Someone told the guy to give them a room, and we let you be."

The pieces connected in Jaune's mind, of how he'd woken up naked in the wrong hotel room, sleeping next to Yang, clothes scattered about the room, but his weapons gone, having no memory of what had happened the night before, and he understood all but one thing.

Why did the innkeeper have them wash dishes to help pay for the room? he thought with great confusion.

"Is that all you wanted to know?" Rosario asked.

"Did the innkeeper take our weapons away?" Jaune asked.

"I'm assuming he did, for your own safety." Rosario nodded.

"Thank you. And... One last thing."

"Yes?"

"Is there any way to divorce?" Jaune asked, and Emerald looked over to him in surprise. "You're right about the promise thing. It's my family creed not to break promises, and our marriage had the whole thing of swearing to be together, right?"

"That's right." Rosario nodded.

"I try to make good on my promises." Jaune continued. "But in this situation, neither of us were in the right mindset to make that kind of decision. Even if it's a family creed, I can't force someone to stay with me because of that. It just... Wouldn't be right." He shook his head, before looking to Emerald. "I'm sorry I let things get so out of control. If you're mad at me, I... I understand."

She gazed quietly at him, Jaune lowering his head.

"I'm not mad." Emerald finally responded, sighing. "This isn't your fault. It's mine. All of this started because I did that whole spin the bottle thing, and acted without thinking."

"I still got you into this situation though."

"Yeah, but I still said I do. We were two drunk idiots goofing around. It could be worse Jaune. No point in beating yourself up over it."

Jaune looked to her, holding her gaze, before nodding.

"Yeah... Alright. Let's just stay away from drinking. That's reasonable, right?" Jaune rubbed his head.

"Or just not get drunk at a time like that." Emerald answered dryly. "There's nothing wrong with drinking if it's a reasonable amount. This all started because we were drinking too much after all."

Jaune managed a small smile at this.

"Lesson learned."

"I can set it up for you two. If that's the attitude you have, we can set up an annulment." Rosario said, and this caused their attention to come to him once more.

"What's that?" Jaune asked.

"There are two ways to end a marriage." Rosario said. "There's divorce, and then there's annulment. With divorce, it's pretty complicated, and you'll usually have to go through a court process of some kind. And even when it's approved, you'll still get marked as "divorced" instead of "not married" in the legal files. Then there's annulment. Annulment is essentially ending the marriage, and, legally speaking, the marriage never happened. There are a lot of reasons people can get an annulled marriage, and one of them involves at least one of the people not being able to make any kind of decision. Except, in this case, BOTH of you were drunk at the time, so it evens out."

"Really?" Emerald asked, having never heard of such a thing.

"Yes. I can set it up if you want me to. Just come by tomorrow, and it'll be ready." Rosario said. "Seeing as you being married was something I was partly responsible for, it's only fair that I do this, right?"

"If you wouldn't mind." Jaune said, grateful for the help.

"Alright. I'm glad you two came. Do you need help finding your way back, after this?" Rosario rose up to his feet.

"No, we're fine." Emerald shook her head, looking to Jaune. "Ready to go?"

"Yeah. Thanks again sir." Jaune said respectfully.

"Thank you for being a good drunk fighter." Rosario replied, walking away as the people present went to take them out.

* * *

As they left the building, and walked through the neighborhood, back to the inn, most of the walk was rather quiet.

"It's still so hard to believe all this happened." Jaune said, a disbelieving smile on his face.

"Were you expecting to get married?"

"It was one of the things I WANTED to do, before I died." Jaune said. "But I didn't think it'd be with YOU of all people."

He had no idea how right he was, Emerald thought.

"Why? What's wrong with marrying me?" She asked, keeping with her Yang mask. "Wasn't marrying a looker something you wanted?"

"There's more to it than looks for me." Jaune said. "I used to try pretending I was sauve, but my ideal relationship would've had a lot more buildup than getting drunk and getting married."

"Alright, that's fair. But what IS your ideal person, anyway?" Emerald asked him.

This gave Jaune pause, him looking pensive.

"I never really thought about it before. I don't know. Have you?"

Emerald looked down in thought, humming.

"If I had to say, it'd probably be... Someone who knows where they're going in life. Someone very driven, who doesn't let their emotions get in the way of what they need to do. And also treats me well."

"That seems like a good kind of partner." Jaune smiled. "I'm sure you'll find someone like that someday."

Emerald thought it over.

"I... did. But... She changed." Emerald answered.

"Who?" Jaune asked, interest piqued.

Emerald blinked, then rubbed her head.

"I'd... Rather not talk about it." Emerald told him.

"Oh... Okay."

Understanding, he didn't pry further.

The rest of the walk was silent, and Emerald thought back to how things had been in the beginning, when she'd first met Cinder.

Life as a homeless person, in essence, had always been rough.

For the vast majority of her life, Emerald always found herself looking for food and water to survive, then looking for a place to sleep where she wasn't completely alone.

Before she had her semblance to aid her, that made up most of her life, in a seemingly endless, monotonous cycle of hunger pangs, suffering through sicknesses, finding places to stay cool during the hot summers, finding sources of warmth during winters, and, quite often, the harassment such a label gave her.

The best solace she could find had been in the books, but these were a momentary reprieve at best, a moment to envision the lives of other people who suffered through trials and left, usually after doing some vague goal of some kind.

When Cinder had approached her, offering a life where her basic needs could be provided for her, it had felt like it had been too good to be true at first.

She was unsure of what to make of her feelings for the future Fall Maiden, but, above all, she had been grateful, happy, for a short time, about their travels.

Things felt perfect to her, and she wouldn't change it for anything.

She had been resistant to Cinder's choice to bring Mercury along, but Cinder's brief brandishing of anger at being questioned served as a precedent for things to come.

In those days, Emerald had felt closest to Cinder, and the woman's support made her start to forget the pain she suffered through, the distance she wanted to place around herself ever since her semblance first activated.

If things had gone on as they had, Emerald would have been content to simply live as she did for the rest of her life.

It likely would've become monotonous, in itself.

But it would've been something she wouldn't mind, if Cinder was with her.

Everything that started happening, after Cinder took Mercury in, was something she grew to dislike however.

It began slowly, a gradual decline that began with Cinder taking half of the Fall Maiden's powers.

Before that, Cinder was always calm and collected, never losing that calmness even in the face of hurting others, or hurting Emerald when she angered her somehow.

But now, at this point, whenever Emerald looked at Cinder, she saw the woman who'd given her everything less and less, and saw someone else, someone she just couldn't recognize.

Thinking on it, Emerald's immediate thought process was to blame the Grimm grafted into her for the change.

But then, another thought gnawed at the back of her head, her having a hard time ignoring, and later, refuting it the more time passed.

What if it wasn't the Grimm inside her? What if Cinder, at her core, had always been the way she was then, and the past several months had only served to have her bring it out more and more?

This final thought lingered in her head for several moments, and only turned elsewhere when Emerald looked up to find they had returned to the inn.

"Are you alright Yang?" Jaune asked.

"Y-Yeah," she put on a grin, "just... Thinking."

Jaune looked to her for a moment.

"Do you need some time alone?" He asked.

"If you wouldn't mind." She sighed. "You can head up to the room. I'll grab our stuff and ask about the money."

"Are you sure?"

"I am."

Jaune looked at the door, but didn't go in immediately.

"If you ever want to talk, I'm willing to listen." He finally said, before going inside.

Emerald sighed behind him as he went, "Alright."

She held her semblance's hold on Jaune until he reached their room and entered it.

She ran a hand down her face tiredly, then walked into the inn.

* * *

Emerald walked to Cinder's room, mental exhaustion clear on her face as she used the card for it, opening the door and stepping inside.

"Cinder... I don't think I can do this anymore." She groaned as she entered, collapsing onto the ground after closing it, holding her weary head. "I don't know how long it'll be, before I slip up."

Cinder looked over to her from her place on the bed, and Emerald looked up to find her covered only by a towel, the raven-haired woman pausing in drying her hair with another one to look to her.

Emerald's eyes widened, before looking away for the sake of Cinder's modesty, rising back up to her feet, Cinder herself giving her a strange sort of look to her.

"Sorry, I'll let you get dressed." Emerald said, turning around to face the door.

"Emerald."

Emerald paused, registering the strange sound of Cinder's voice, looking back to her as a gut feeling told the illusionist something was off.

"Do you need help?" Emerald asked her uncertainly, watching as Cinder too rose to her feet, her human hand holding her towel over her body as she began breathing strangely.

For Cinder's part, the sight of Emerald looked so different than before.

She looked so much more... mesmerizing than was normal, something about the girl drawing her in.

Cinder's heart began to race, pulsing with an unpleasant sensation that ran along her body, encompassing her entire being as her breathing hitched, grip on the towels covering her body loosening as they fell on the floor.

Hands hanging by her sides, Cinder took a lumbering, barefoot step forward.

Something in Emerald's expression changed, and the unpleasant sensation filling her spiked greatly, her eyes beginning to glow, Grimm hand twitching.

A voice called out to her, and she realized it was Emerald, but her voice felt distant, far-off.

The unpleasant feeling curdling inside of her only grew stronger with each passing second, and Cinder's mind grew more detached as it eroded at her psyche, overriding her sense of self.

Emerald found herself pressing her back against the door, identifying the familiar gut feeling she'd had then.

"Cinder- Cinder, it's me." She told her, trying to reason with her, but it seemed her words fell on deaf ears.

Golden eyes glowing with a potent, feral gaze, they narrowed into a glare as Cinder kept moving forward.

Emerald's forearm touched against the doorknob, her eyes widening as she briefly thought of whether she'd be able to open the door and leave or not, whether it would be enough time to run out the room.

As she thought these things however, Cinder's eyes darted to her hand, and Emerald's blood ran cold as she realized Cinder knew what she was thinking to do.

Even before she could act, the erratically twitching Grimm hand whipped up, shooting forward and ramming its palm over Emerald's mouth, Emerald's head hitting against the door with a loud thud, the demonic hand's spindly black fingers gently wrapping around and gripping her skull.

Then, with a horrid feeling, it started draining her aura from her face, Emerald giving a muffled yell of pain as Cinder walked the last few steps to reach her.

Fearfully, she reached up to the hand grabbing her face, trying to pull it off, but it didn't give, Cinder approaching her, her human hand clasping Emerald's forearm, gripping with inhuman strength, and as fire laced her palms, burning into Emerald's flesh, Emerald's muffled yells turned into pained screams.

Cinder wore a deranged smile, the feel of Emerald's life force draining away easing the horrid sensation filling her, the smell of Emerald's burning flesh filling her with a new sensation: Hunger.

Her glowing eyes trailed along Emerald's body, her exposed skin, and stopped upon finding her neck, the Fall Maiden lining her teeth with her aura, the idea of biting down into this helpless girl's neck seeming wonderful, until the girl's struggles caught her attention, giving her pause.

In the back of her mind, something clicked.

 _'That wouldn't do,_ ' it said.

 _'That would end it too quickly.'_

Cinder released her wrist, finding satisfaction in the girl's attempts at grasping at her Grimm hand to get it off, Emerald's freed hand reaching back towards her guns, but them being impossible to pull out between her being forced against the wall and her rapidly depleting aura disorienting her worse and worse.

Cinder reached up, hand glowing with her fires, and the girl's eyes widened as she realized Cinder began to slowly and deliberately reach towards her neck, savoring every second to when her life would end.

Emerald reached her hand up, grasping at Cinder's human wrist, her rapidly weakening strength making this an exercise in futility, but her survival instincts dictating her to try out of desperation.

Cinder stared up at her with savage delight, her deliberately not retching her hand away from hers to prolong it further, her watching the girl's steadily less lucid eyes, unconsciousness undoubtedly threatening to overtake her.

With the last dregs of her strength, the girl looked down at her, with the same look as a cornered animal chased by a predator, looking fearfully into her soon-to-be killer's eyes for even the smallest hint of mercy.

The sight was enough to make Cinder freeze.

Then, with abrupt movement, she released Emerald's mouth, stumbling back as though stung, Emerald collapsing onto the floor with her aura almost fully drained.

Cinder stared, wide-eyed, at the sight of Emerald on the ground, her taking the consequences of her actions in, the viscious, horribly burned parts of Emerald's arm, and the utterly drained state the girl had been put into.

Cinder looked down to her Grimm arm slowly, before looking back to Emerald once more.

Her expression seemed almost lost, as though the sight before her confused her greatly.

"... Emerald... Did I hurt you again?" She asked.

Emerald didn't answer, expression pained as she tried to get into a proper sitting position.

"Yes." She said, almost inaudible, rising to her feet unsteadily.

Cinder looked to her Grimm hand.

"I don't understand what's going on." Cinder said, but her voice showed no signs of apology, only frustrated confusion. "Do you have negative feeling about me? Is it your fault I'm acting like this?"

"... MY fault?" She asked, tone growing cold, the unpleasant feeling in Cinder returning. "Your first thought, after nearly _killing_ me... is asking if it's MY FAULT?"

"Is it?" Cinder asked.

"I'm sorry," Emerald said, tone scornful and sarcastic, "I guess if I hadn't been stuck with a blonde dumbass all day, so YOU could get off on his suffering, I wouldn't be FEELING tired and exhausted, would I?"

In the next instant, Cinder whipped her Grimm hand up, and Emerald reached behind herself, gripping the hilt of her gun before whipping it out, slicing at the woman's hand as Cinder gave a pained sound as it was cut by her blade.

Fueled by her anger and outrage, Emerald ran forward, hands grasping Cinder's shoulders and using her weight to tackle her onto the bed while she was distracted.

"Listen to me!" She yelled down at the woman. "This! Isn't! YOU! Look at yourself, look what these Grimm implants are DOING to you!"

Cinder reached up, forcibly flipping them over as she pinned Emerald down, golden eyes flaring with fiery light.

"Be QUIET!" She snarled. "Who gave you the right to talk?!"

Emerald struggled under her, but Cinder gripped her arms with inhuman strength, forcing them against the bed.

"Don't forget that I can kill you at any time. Are you in THAT much of a hurry to die? Huh?!"

Emerald glared up at her, with something Cinder thought was defiance, the Maiden gritting her teeth.

"Do you even see what this is doing to you Cinder?" She asked, quietly, expression softening into something Cinder had never seen in her eyes before.

Pity.

Anger flooded her, and raised her hand up, flames bursting from her palm in a handheld inferno.

Emerald stared up at her, eyes narrowing, before she breathed a sigh, closing her eyes, quietly waiting for her to finish it.

When the heat of her flames dissipated however, and her weight on her eased, Emerald reopening her eyes.

Cinder stared down at her, golden eyes curdling in restrained anger.

"Why?" The woman on top of her asked.

"Why what?" Emerald asked.

"Why do you keep trying?" Cinder asked. "You're afraid of me. You hate me. Why are you still here?"

Emerald breathed a sigh, noting the disappointment she felt.

In that moment, she felt calm, calmer than she had ever felt before, even looking up at Cinder's expression, filled with a wrath fueled by confusion.

Suddenly uncaring of the consequence, she answered.

"Because I love you."

Cinder furrowed her brows at this reason.

"You... love me?" She asked, tone skeptical.

Emerald stared at her, then closed her eyes tiredly.

* * *

Choice 1: "... I do."

Choice 2: "... I did. But not anymore."

* * *

A/N: Hello. If you're wondering about the thing up there, it isn't for a voting thing.

When I started writing this story, I wrote it with the intention of making multiple endings.

This is my way of incorporating that: Choice 1 will be input in the next chapter, and Choice 2 will be the chapter afterwards.

One will lead to one of the endings, while the other will continue the story from there.

(I also wonder how many Drunken Marriage fics actually bring up the subject of annulling the marriage, on the grounds that the premise hinges on the parties being drunk at the time.

The supposed goal of most of Drunk Marriage fics is writing an accidental marriage scenario where someone's Jaune ship of interest is written out.

The whole "wedding vow has a promise, and Arcs can't break promises" thing felt a bit weird to put in here, but here it is... According to this take on Jaune's set of standards, basically saying that je doesn't want to force it if he can help it.)

Now, as for the OC: Rosario is based somewhat off of crime family bosses. And that's about it. Yeah.

Enjoy!


	9. Choice 1: I do

"You... love me?" Cinder asked, tone skeptical.

The girl stared up at her, then closed her eyes.

"I do." She replied.

Cinder narrowed her eyes.

"What could you _love_ about me?" She asked, spitting the word out with venom. "Are you lying to save yourself?"

"No." Her tone held nothing but resigned weariness. "I don't know how to explain it. But... I love you."

"How could you?" Cinder asked, scornful.

"I don't know how to explain it!" She repeated with exasperation, looking up to her. "Before I met you, I was just drifting along. Just - going through the motions, with no place to call home, no one to call family. I never wanted to trust anyone, never thought I could. But... something about you made me reconsider it. When I was with you, when I was living _for_ you... everything was different."

She thought back to the time after she'd killed those men in the alleyway, how, after the adrenaline high had come and gone, and the danger passed, she had been utterly horrified with the realization of what she'd done.

There had been policemen patrolling the area, and she bottled her disgust to run away from the scene, hiding her guns as best she could as she ran away.

She had been aghast at herself, for taking the life of someone else, fearful of the consequences likely about to come down on her, once the police had their hands on her.

All throughout that night, she didn't sleep, with several days passing with her trying to fight sleep, mind fearing, and later dreading, what would happen if someone found out she was a murderer, countless ideas pouring through her mind, none of them easing her in any way.

She tried rationalizing it to herself, over and over, thinking of how they could have done unspeakable things to her if she hadn't acted, and her conscious would conflict with it, wondering if there could have been any way it could've ended differently.

Despite this, despite her building up a world of what-ifs, the same thing lingered in her mind, making her ever more wary of everyone around her, no matter how far she drifted from place to place.

Even when the dread had finally eased into the back of her mind, when she had fallen into a pattern of using her semblance to help her with stealing, she still kept to herself as much as she thought possible.

Knowing what she had done was irrevocable, she eventually came to terms with it, and from there, she fell into the same mindset that would shape her life until she met Cinder, that it was all a matter of survival for her.

This made her choose to not trust anyone, for the sake of staying out of trouble, and this persisted even when Cinder had first approached her, having seen exactly what Emerald had done the day they'd met, where she'd stolen jewelry from someone.

On that day, she found herself fleeing, running as quickly as she could, only to find herself in a dead end after a wrong turn, with Cinder at the entryway seconds later.

Initially as fearful as always, Emerald looked for every potential route of escape she could find, but the only way out of the alleyway had been through Cinder.

Having seen the weapons tucked on Cinder's back, Emerald doubted it would be so simple as simply running past her, and her first thought was to draw her weapons.

When Cinder made it clear that she wasn't there to apprehend her however, it gave her pause, and later on, when they'd escaped, and Cinder showed Emerald the extent of the sort of things she could do, she felt many different things when Cinder offered to take her in.

Above all, fear and uncertainty were the most blatant emotions she could feel, even as Cinder trained her to fight, simply because of how dangerous she proved to be.

That fear had faded away with time, and Emerald understood, to some extent, that this was perhaps the closest she could find to stability and companionship, given the circumstances.

Beneath it all however, there had been other things, things such as admiration for Cinder's drive, gratitude for helping her, and, beyond there, a part of her that quietly craved for her approval.

When those emotions had changed into what she felt then, Emerald didn't know.

Even as she'd confessed, she had spoken the truth already: that she couldn't understand her emotions herself, much less explain them to the person she felt them towards.

"I was... alone before. I didn't have any idea what to do, what I was living for, why I was still alive. But I only did what I did, so I could survive. I was scared, but I wanted to live. Despite that, that kind of life never made me... happy." She explained it up to her. "I was just a cluster of emotions, stuck between wanting it to end and wanting to live. Even if that doesn't make sense, it was how I lived. But with you - with you, I _didn't_ feel that way. I don't know how to explain it, but you... you helped me feel more than just that. Every day I spent with you, I found myself not wanting it to end."

She breathed heavily, mind searching desperately to elaborate on her words, wanting to answer Cinder's question.

"Before I met you, I was just... alive. Alive, but without a sense of purpose beyond survival. There were even times where I thought dying would be better than living like that. But I still stole, did anything I thought I had to do. When I was with you, it was... different. You made me _happy_. Made me feel I actually _could_ have a purpose. Now... now that I'm with you, I feel okay. I don't _hate_ you Cinder. I _never_ did. I... I love you. I would do _anything_ for you, if you asked me to."

Cinder gauged the girl's expression, the wavering earnesty and desperation in her voice, and nothing made her believe that any of Emerald's words were lies.

Her eyes narrowed in a scowl, a hand trailing up Emerald's side, fingers moving up her chest, past her collarbone, stopping over the illusionist's neck.

"You would do _anything_ I tell you to?" Cinder asked her, Emerald feeling her heart racing, heat beginning to burn into her neck from Cinder's fingers.

"Y-Yes." Emerald said, voice growing small.

* * *

 **(A/N: Trigger warning: Anyone uncomfortable with things relating to rape and the like will probably be better off skipping the rest of the text, until the next line skip.)**

* * *

Cinder reached her hand lower, eyes narrowing.

"Close your eyes." Cinder told her, and Emerald did so after a brief second of hesitation, only for her eyes to snap back open when she felt her hand grasping the girl's top, tearing it roughly off of her as Emerald instinctively tried moving away, only for Cinder to reach her Grimm hand forward, tightly clasping Emerald's neck in her hand.

Cinder looked down at her, the unpleasant sensation in her body curdling anew.

Despite this, she remained calm, in contrast to Emerald, who stared with open shock at what Cinder was doing, the cold malice her gaze held making Emerald quiver in place.

"You've forgotten your place again." Cinder said, the poise of her words belying the anger she felt.

Emerald's eyes widened, whispering, without thinking, "Wait... Cinder -"

She tried to move, but Cinder's grip around her neck tightened, Emerald trying to reach a hand up to the hand serenely choking her, but her depleted aura making her grip as strong as a starved child, red eyes looking up to Cinder, trying in vain to beg her to calm down.

"Even now, you're proving my point." Cinder said coldly, leaning down to her. "You've only brought this on yourself. Remember that."

Emerald's hand reached up, attempting to push the woman off of her, but Cinder reaching down, taking hold of her arm and pinning it down to the bed, Emerald struggling instinctively to get Cinder off of her.

Despite this, Cinder looked down at her, smiling at her futile struggles against her.

Using her strength, Cinder released Emerald's neck, instead taking hold of the girl's burnt arm, raising her hands above her head, stacking them atop one another, and holding them both there with her Grimm hand, Emerald freed wind pipe flooding with air, but her still struggling against the Maiden with what little remained of her strength.

Again, the sounds of Emerald's voice sounded distant to Cinder, warped from that weak expression of earnesty to one filled with fear once again, Cinder's anger fading in lieu of satisfaction of such a change.

Her free hand reached down, violently tearing the remaining fabrics of cloth and leather away from Emerald's body, Emerald starting to try yelling, only for Cinder to reach to her mouth and clasp it, this inciting Emerald to struggle with even greater desperation, giving muffled screams as her body writhed with under Cinder's weight, Cinder leaning down into the helpless girl's ear.

"You seemed to enjoy yourself the day before... I think I'll have to try it myself."

Emerald's struggles eventually ceased, but the wellspring of pained emotions crossing her face, and encompassing Cinder's Grimm-corrupted senses, made Cinder derive a sadistic satisfaction that fed into itself, growing more insatiable by the minute, Emerald's eyes flooding with tears as she gazed into the feral delight of Cinder's gleaming eyes.

Emerald closed her eyes, her depleted strength rendering hoarse voice unable to do more than whimpers, struggles stopping when she couldn't bring herself to fight it anymore.

Cinder, seemingly realizing this, frowned, releasing Emerald's mouth, only to reach down and place her hand against Emerald's exposed stomach, flames burning into the girl's flesh as she gave a cry of pain, only for it to be cut short by Cinder ramming her lips against hers, the agony of the girl claiming to love her sparking her sadistic impulses and sating them at once, Cinder none too gently starting to grind her hips against Emerald's as she took in the girl's struggles with glee, wanting for more as the thief was made to suffer for her enjoyment.

* * *

Looking over the girl, once the feelings curdling inside Cinder finally simmered down enough for her to feel what she perceived as satisfaction, Emerald lay curled up, staring forward towards nothing.

"I think you've learned your lesson now." Cinder said down to her, smiling at the numerous burn marks covering Emerald's naked body, hand trailing almost teasingly against them.

Emerald didn't react, despite the pain this caused her, not looking to the figure sitting over her and stroking the marks burnt into her.

"You can borrow my dress, if you ever decide to leave." Cinder told her. "It wouldn't do for people to see your burn marks."

Emerald remained unresponsive, her only getting up after several minutes, doing what Cinder said, putting on the Maiden's clothes as she stalked away.

Emerald said nothing as she reclothed herself, the one-sleeved dress covering her arm, but her walking away slowly, making to leave the room.

As she exited, Emerald put little thought into what she was going to do, simply acting, activating her semblance to try and affect Jaune's mind as she walked to the room they shared, only to find the man walking up the hall, expression pensive before looking up to find her there.

Something in his expression changed upon seeing her, semblance or no, Emerald pausing in turn, him looking as though he was considering a number of different things, before he seemed to gather his resolve, walking towards her.

"Are you alright?" He asked her immediately, as though sensing something wrong with her.

"I'm fine." She shook her head, though her voice was weary. "I just... need a moment to myself."

She turned to the door without another word, Jaune looking after her, seeming to want to go after her, but stopping himself.

Staring at the door for a few moments, Jaune could only lower his head, whipering to himself in disbelief.

"... Of all the people to share my first binge drink with, and it ends up being _her_?"

* * *

' _I have only got what I deserved, for taking compassion on so villainous a creature_.'

* * *

A/N: This is how the normal route goes.

Things break off in a much different fashion on the other end of things though; I'll be posting Ending 1 of 3 later on, in the next chapter.

As a side note, I looked back at "Beginning of the End" to make sure I got certain details right about how Emerald and Cinder met.

It was jarring actually hearing Cinder speaking (I haven't really looked at RWBY, sans a few clips of fights, since Volume 5 ended), given how little emotion she uses.

It feels stilted and almost robotic, like it's an act of politeness and nothing more (which, given Cinder going from cold and calculating to blood-lustful and sadistic after Ruby Silver Eyed her, seems rather plausible.

More details on Jaune's perspective in this chapter will be given later on as well.

Just a matter of time.


	10. Choice 2: Not anymore (Breakaway End)

Since coming to the inn, Jaune had been preoccupied by his thoughts, thinking of the things he'd heard.

"I didn't think drinking would be that dangerous for me." He muttered, only to perk up at the sound of yells.

" _MY fault? Your_ first _thought, after nearly_ killing _me... is asking if it's MY FAULT?"_

" _Is it?_ "

" _I'm_ sorry, _I guess if I hadn't been stuck with a blonde dumbass all day, so YOU could get off on his suffering, I wouldn't be FEELING tired and exhausted, would I?_ "

The voices came through the wall, to the neighboring room, Jaune standing up as he recognized the voices speaking, heart racing.

"Listen to me! This! Isn't! YOU! Look at yourself, look what these Grimm implants are DOING to you!"

" _Be QUIET_!" Cinder snarled. " _Who gave you the right to talk?! Don't forget that I can kill you at any time. Are you in THAT much of a hurry to die? Huh?!"_

" _... Do you even see what this is doing to you Cinder_?"

Cinder didn't answer for a long moment of time, but Jaune hearkened nonetheless, looking around the room, wondering what a viable weapon could be made out of.

* * *

"Why do you keep trying?" Cinder asked. "You're afraid of me. You hate me. Why are you still here?"

Emerald breathed a sigh, noting the disappointment she felt.

In that moment, she felt calm, calmer than she had ever felt before, even looking up at Cinder's expression, filled with a wrath fueled by confusion.

Suddenly uncaring of the consequence, she answered.

"Because I love you."

Cinder furrowed her brows at this reason.

"You... love me?" She asked, tone skeptical.

Emerald stared at her, then closed her eyes tiredly.

"Cinder... Please, listen to me." Emerald said. "Just... Look at yourself. Look at how much you've suffered, for all of this."

"... When you're fighting this sort of fight, you can only expect getting hurt." Cinder responded, tone cold.

"That's not what I meant." She told her, sighing.

She sat up slowly, reaching up to gently stroke Cinder's cheek, looking to her scars, before her other hand moved, trailing along to the Grimm arm.

"You're hurting. You're KILLING yourself, for these cravings you have. First it was power. Then it was revenge. And every time, you suffered for it, more and more." Emerald frowned. "I don't know what would've happened, if I hadn't followed you down to the Vault. But... I doubt you'd still be alive. Jaune almost killed you, because Ruby was there. RAVEN would've killed you, if I hadn't caught you at the last second."

She gazed up at her, expression pained, and Cinder gazed at her, unable to form a response.

"You're killing yourself, going like this. You're driving yourself closer and closer to the edge... and eventually, you won't be able to get back up. You'll drive yourself so low that you won't even recognize yourself anymore. I can barely see the person I fell in love with... All I can see right now is someone who doesn't care about anything, even her own safety, unless it's what SHE wants, no matter how dangerous it is." Emerald held her gaze, then looked away. "I'm sorry... But I can't do this anymore. I can't watch you get yourself killed. I love you too much... And I don't know what I'd do, if I lost you."

Cinder gazed in stunned silence at her, and Emerald shifted to get up.

"... You're going to leave?" Cinder asked.

Emerald didn't respond.

She only tried to get up, Cinder standing up, taking lumbering steps towards the door.

"You'll die if you back out now. You know that, don't you?" Cinder asked, and this seemed to stop Emerald.

"I don't deserve to live anyways." Emerald answered solemnly. "After everything we caused, all the people I let get killed... I deserve to die."

"So you'd just leave me alone?" Cinder asked. "After everything, it ends over this?"

Emerald lowered her head.

"I think... This has been a long time coming Cinder. It's not just this. If it were just a dumb, mean prank taken too far, or something like that... I could take it. But... you're too reckless. You don't know how hard it was before, seeing you so hurt that you couldn't even speak. When you started to recover, I was so happy, and so scared. Scared it might happen again. But... I didn't do enough. Enough to stop... THIS from happening."

She gestured haphazardly to the room, and Cinder was unsure of whether she referred to the current situation, or their positions in general.

"... You do enough Emerald. Enough to show that you care." Cinder said, though the emotion behind her words, that slight intonation of regret she gave, was hollow.

Emerald turned around, looking back to her.

"Then why do you blame me whenever you get a blood frenzy? I'm obviously doing something wrong, aren't I?"

"No... I was wrong. You were right. I HAVE changed since before." She sighed, then took slow, careful steps closer to her. "But... Things will get better, I promise. I won't hurt you anymore. This will be the last time."

"... you promise?" Emerald asked her, and Cinder smiled.

"Yes." Cinder said as she neared the girl, reaching up to cup her cheek with her human hand, only Emerald to step forward before she could do so, closing the distance between them as she looked into Cinder's eyes, the woman watching her gently wrap her arms around her, leaning up.

Cinder closed her eyes, leaning forward, only to reopen them upon feeling Emerald's lips against her cheek, looking to the girl hugging her, before her form dissipated, her eyes widening before looking to find Emerald standing halfway out the door, deactivating her semblance.

Her eyes had filled with tears, more exhausted than Cinder had ever seen her.

"I want to believe it... But I can't." She shook her head. "I'm sorry Cinder... But this is goodbye."

Cinder narrowed her eyes at her.

"There's really no talking you out of this?" Cinder asked, her Grimm parts sensing not the slightest ounce of fear present in Emerald.

Surely Emerald wasn't GENUINELY thinking of doing this? she wondered.

Once more, Emerald didn't respond for a moment, gazing at Cinder.

"... Take care of yourself." She finally said, the words being forced out, her trying to close the door without waiting for a response.

Just before she could close the door however, Cinder's Grimm hand shot forward, wrapping tightly around Emerald's ankle before harshly tugging her foot from under her, Emerald giving a surprised yell into the hall before being forcibly dragged back inside, dragged along the floor before Cinder raised her foot, slamming it down into Emerald's chest.

"I don't think you heard me." Cinder said down to her, Emerald trying to push herself back up, only for Cinder to push her back down onto the floor, the girl wheezing under her. "You'll DIE if you back out now."

Emerald looked up at her, finding her forming a jet black bow and arrow from her flames, aiming the point down at her.

"Is that what you want?" Cinder asked her.

Emerald stared at the arrowhead, shock and surprise making her unable to immediately answer the question, and as Cinder looked down at her, waiting for her answer, she perked up at the sudden sound of a fire alarm going off, looking up in time to see the man skidding to a stop before the open door.

She recognized that it was Jaune just before he raised the item he had in his hands at her, squeezing the nozzle and shooting a stream of white at her.

Her first reaction was torn between covering her face and covering her modesty, and Emerald, seeing the opportunity, pushed up against Cinder's foot, making her balance become uneven while Emerald scrambled to her feet, stepping towards the door with the intent of running as Cinder made a barrier of aura around herself.

Cinder reasserted her balance a second later however, and she whipped her human hand up while channeling her Maiden powers, a potent gust of wind ramming into them, Emerald hitting the wall while Jaune was sent flying into the hallway, the power behind it blowing a massive chunk of the wall into the hallway.

Jaune's bearings were scattered when his back rammed into the wall, denting it, before he landed on his knees, losing his grip on the fire hydrant as he looked up, seeing Emerald laying atop a pile of rubble, trying to get up but struggling to do so.

He looked up to find Cinder raising a hand, a spear of fire forming into her palm, Jaune hurriedly clamoring for the fire extinguisher, hand gripping it just before he ducked, him concentrating his aura around himself, only for the arrow in question to glow brightly, imploding violently, sending him sprawling onto the floor.

Emerald lifted her head up, looking to the person before her.

"Why...?" She rasped, Jaune looking to her before forcing himself back up, positioning himself next to her just before placing a hand on her arm, activating his semblance while attempting to channel it into her, the sensation of his aura entering her body making her weak and shaking body find strength, Emerald snapping her eyes up to find Cinder still walking over to them.

Cinder saw the pair rising up to their feet, attempting to run off, her narrowing her eyes before firing a column of flame from her palm to the pair, only for their forms to dissipate upon impact, Cinder's eyes widening, just before Jaune appeared a second later, right before her, him swinging the fire extinguisher at her face as hard as he could, her seeing him too late to put up an aura barrier as the blow hit, making her stumble back briefly, only to concentrate her aura into her hand and ram it into Jaune's stomach, him being sent hurtling through the air and into the wall, over Emerald and then behind her.

Cinder grit her teeth, hand speeding forward to grab the knight, Emerald standing up grasping her Grimm arm as it stretched in this manner, her grabbing her gun, letting the knife end come out, before swinging it down on the inhuman limb, cutting it off as Cinder gave a pained yell, arm retracting itself as she grasped it.

Emerald turned, reaching for Jaune and using her best to hoist the taller man to his feet and pull him along the hallway, Jaune managing a run after a few seconds, Cinder looking after them, about to go after them, but stopping herself, remembering her lack of clothes, looking over to her dress and moving.

* * *

"Emerald," Jaune began to say, "do you know where my sword and shield are?"

Emerald looked back at him, incredulous.

"Don't you get what you're dealing with right now?" She exclaimed.

"YES," Jaune answered bluntly, "that's why I set the alarm off, so people would leave! Do you know where my weapons are?"

Emerald looked back at him, before looking to the staircase, then back down the hall.

He seemed to read the answer from her expression.

"It-It's back there?" He asked.

"In that bathroom closet." Emerald said, and Jaune turned, her eyes widening, but her grasping his arm. "Wait, it's me she's after right now. You don't have the strength to fight her."

"What if she attacks someone else?" Jaune asked, concerned.

"She won't. Right now she's just angry at me." Emerald told him, before looking to find Cinder getting out of the hole she put in the wall while wearing her red dress, both youths feeling their blood run cold.

They didn't discuss it further when Cinder started flying down the corridor after them, them instead turning and bolting down towards the door as quickly as their feet could carry them, Emerald looking back and finding Cinder reaching behind them, Jaune looking back before his eyes widened at the sight of the Maiden stopping, but not attacking them, the pair not stopping as they went past several people to flee, running as quickly as they could from the inn.

The innkeeper watched the pair running off, eyebrows raising themselves up, before looking to the woman standing at the top of the staircase, her quickly going about going down.

In light of what sounded like a set of explosions earlier, the innkeeper decided to go about getting everyone outside first.

Despite her calm exterior, Cinder mentally frowned, calming herself down for the sake of not drawing the attention of the many potential witnesses if she tried her hand at attacking the fleeing pair, putting on an act as she always had.

* * *

As they ran through the streets, Emerald's heart raced with fear, Jaune eventually stopping to look back.

"Do you think we've run far enough?" He asked, looking to Emerald.

"I don't know." Emerald said, holding her head, trying to comprehend the last few minutes of her life, before looking to Jaune, finally asking the obvious question. "But... Why did you try helping me?"

He had known, by then, that she had been working for Cinder already, which made his getting involved all the more jarring in her case.

He looked at her, but found himself not understanding himself quite yet, but him being honest.

"You're not working for Cinder anymore, right?" Jaune asked.

"... How do you know?" Emerald questioned.

"The way Cinder was yelling... I heard you two talking, so I tried eavesdropping, when I realized who you were." Jaune explained to her. "When I heard what you were saying, about not being able to do it anymore, and how Cinder was responding, warning you about it, I... I didn't know how else to react, hearing what I'd heard. I didn't know where my weapons were, you guys apparently have a thing where leaving equals getting killed, and Cinder was there. I just grabbed the fire extinguisher, heard you yelling, and after that I was just hoping for the best."

Emerald stared blankly at him, then began walking away, gesturing for Jaune to follow.

"Okay... So..." She crossed her arms, thinking about his last question about his weapons. "You know what's been happening? What... I've been doing?"

"I had an idea of it." Jaune admitted, explaining further.

He recalled the events of the night before, when he'd first asked the innkeeper about his weapons.

"I'm surprised you don't have your stuff back yet." The innkeeper responded.

"What do you mean?" Jaune asked, confused.

"Your wife came along, asking to take them back." He explained. "I figured there wouldn't be much harm to it, so I gave it to her, before she stepped out with them all."

Jaune found this strange for several reasons, but didn't suspect anything right then.

"Do you know where she went?"

"No, sorry. You can wait for her, if you want."

Jaune, despite this suggestion, went out and asked around if anyone had seen a girl carrying a pair of swords, as Weiss used a rapier in combat.

Instead of hearing of such a person, the few people who were still lingering about and seeing anything resembling that gave descriptions that were quite decidedly not of Weiss, but of Emerald.

This caused Jaune increasing worry as he went searching around for Weiss, only for his search to end with him giving up and thinking it best to just go back and wait for Weiss back at the hotel room.

Due to Emerald taking an extremely long time walking however, Jaune was left feeling antsy, pacing the room for several minutes, going out to search more, and wondering how he would tell Weiss what happened.

By the end, however, he was simply so exhausted from said worrying and searching that he resolved to simply wait to wait for Weiss and tell her in the morning.

Hearing Jaune's take on the whole thing, Emerald recalled how she'd been walking aimlessly for several hours straight, thinking over her memories and nightmares over her role in Beacon's fall, along with what she'd done to Jaune in the very recent interim, culminating in said walk around the area.

In the end, she'd resolved to tell Jaune the truth herself, and put his weapon away in a safe spot in the meantime.

"Was that when you figured it out?"

"Not really. I didn't realize until we'd first heard about our... Night on the town." Jaune flushed in embarrassment. "Everyone sounded like they were talking weird, at random times, and it didn't make much sense to me, since I was the only one who noticed. The whole thing of Weiss turning into Yang... SOMEHOW was even weirder. I didn't know what to think, since nothing made sense. Then I had a weird thought, that maybe I was just seeing things wrong somehow, even if I couldn't explain it. Then I actually HEARD you two yelling at each other, and... the rest sort of fell together."

"How did you get that out of us yelling?" Emerald questioned.

"You said that if..." He stopped, trailing off. "If you hadn't had to spend time with me all day, "you probably wouldn't be so tired." You didn't say my name specifically, sure, but you mentioned someone blonde and dumb. That sounds enough like me."

Emerald winced, rubbing her head.

"I'm sorry Jaune. I didn't mean for things to get out of hand like this."

"At this point, I don't know what to say." Jaune said. "But you didn't want to work with Cinder anymore, because of how things had changed, right?"

"Yeah, basically." Emerald sighed.

"I don't know what to think right now, but if you have a target painted on your back, you wouldn't want to do all this alone, would you?"

She looked up to him as they kept their brisk pace.

"What's that supposed to mean?" She asked, curious of his intentions, given his helping her previously.

"I don't know. I'm just... Trying to figure out what to do next."

"Cinder isn't after you." She reminded him.

Jaune was skeptic.

"What were you two going to do to me, once you got tired of this whole marriage thing?" He asked.

Emerald's expression turned blank as she remembered Cinder's plan for all of this.

"She... Wanted to take you hostage." Emerald answered.

Jaune sighed.

"I think we should try finding Haven again. At least we'd be safer there."

"What do you plan on doing with me, once we get there?" Emerald asked.

"I don't know Emerald, something other than you getting hurt?" Jaune responded.

"Hm."

With her having time to calm down, she thought over the situation, mulling over the fact that she was going to Haven, where what waited for her would probably be war prisoner related, given everything that she'd done.

She wondered, however briefly, if taking her chances to run would be worth it, given that Cinder was still looking for her.

This question served to fixate itself in her mind for several minutes as they walked through the crowds.

* * *

A/N: And thus, Ending 1 is done.

I say it's Ending 1, but it's really about as far in this direction that I'll go for this route of the story.

When I thought out the overall plot, and the endings, this one came up as being the one I call the Loose End ending, simply because it's how things would turn out if I had plotted the story different.

The other two endings are more towards the end, where the problems are fixed.

This ending still has a couple major things left open, and is more or less the groundwork of a completely different story about Jaune and Emerald going along towards Haven Academy while running into Cinder and detailing the struggles to be had with this.

I got ambitious with this story, since it feels like the first multi-chaptered one I'll actually finish, so here I am, posting two different chapters in two days.

Now the story's two-thirds of the way done.

I'm getting there, slowly but surely.


	11. Home

Since coming to the inn, Jaune had been preoccupied by his thoughts, thinking of the things he'd heard of his drunken escapades.

"I didn't think drinking would be that dangerous for me." He muttered, only to perk up at the sound of yells.

" _MY fault? Your first thought, after nearly killing me... is asking if it's MY FAULT?"_

 _"Is it?"_

 _"I'm sorry, I guess if I hadn't been stuck with a blonde dumbass all day, so YOU could get off on his suffering, I wouldn't be FEELING tired and exhausted, would I?"_

The voices came through the wall, to the neighboring room, Jaune standing up as he recognized the voices speaking, heart stopping.

" _Listen to me! This! Isn't! YOU! Look at yourself, look what these Grimm implants are DOING to you!"_

 _"Be QUIET!"_ The voice of Cinder snarled. _"Who gave you the right to talk?! Don't forget that I can kill you at any time. Are you in THAT much of a hurry to die? Huh?!"_

 _"... Do you even see what this is doing to you Cinder?"_

Cinder didn't answer for a long moment of time, but Jaune hearkened nonetheless, looking around the room, wondering what a viable weapon could be made out of.

Before he could do so however, the sound of Cinder's voice made him pause, him looking over to the wall before placing his ear against it, heart racing in his chest.

 _"Why do you keep trying?"_ Cinder was asking with conviction. _"You're afraid of me. You HATE me. Why are you still here?"_

 _"... Because I love you."_ Emerald replied, calm and almost matter-of-fact.

Cinder, for her part, sounded confused and frustrated.

" _You..._ Love _me? What could you love about me? Are you lying, to save yourself?"_

 _"No. I don't know how to explain it. But... I love you."_

" _How COULD you?_ " Cinder asked, scornful.

" _I don't know how to explain it!_ " Emerald repeated with exasperation.

Jaune looked about once more, suddenly frantic as he went about searching for something, anything.

" _Before I met you, I was just drifting along. Just - going through the motions, with no place to call home, no one to call family. I never wanted to trust anyone, never thought I could. But... something about you made me reconsider it. When I was with you, when I was living for you... everything was different."_

For a few moments, all was silent, Jaune leaning away from the wall, but Emerald's voice still coming through, even if muffled slightly, now that he knew to listen.

 _"I was... alone before. I didn't have any idea what to do, what I was living for, why I was still alive. But I only did what I did, so I could survive. I was scared, but I wanted to live. Despite that, that kind of life never made me... happy. I was just a cluster of emotions, stuck between wanting it to end and wanting to live. Even if that doesn't make sense, it was how I lived. But with you - with you, I didn't feel that way. I don't know how to explain it, but you... you helped me feel more than just that. Every day I spent with you, I found myself NOT wanting it to end."_

By this point, her voice had seemed to grow earnest and desperate, stumbling over her words, but pushing herself nonetheless.

 _"Before I met you, I was just... alive. Alive, but without a sense of purpose beyond survival. There were even times where I thought dying would be better than living like that. But I still stole, did anything I thought I had to do. When I was with you, it was... different. You made me happy. Made me feel I actually could have a purpose. Now... now that I'm with you, I feel okay. I don't hate you Cinder. I never did. I... I love you. I would do anything for you, if you asked me to."_

Jaune slowly stepped away from the wall, looking towards the door, before he heard Cinder give her response.

 _"You would do anything I tell you to?"_

The potential of the things behind such a question, especially when coming from Cinder, was enough to drive Jaune to flee from the room, running down the hall.

* * *

He rushed down the steps of the inn's second floor, sprinting to the inn keeper's desk, him perking up in surprise at Jaune.

"What's wrong? Did something happen?" He asked, concerned.

"I'm sorry to ask this out of the blue," Jaune said, breathless, "but... Did the girl I came here with come to take our weapons?"

The man quirked an eyebrow at him.

"She did." He answered slowly. "I already told you this yesterday."

Hearing this made him pause, his fear growing in the pit of his stomach.

"... I thought so." Jaune sighed, looking down, before looking back at him. "It was the girl I came in with, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay. I uh... I know this will sound strange," Jaune crossed his arms, "but can you tell me what she looked like?"

As expected, the man gave him a weird look, the sort that wss at a midpoint between baffled confusion and disbelief.

"You're... You're asking what your wife looks like. You understand that, don't you?" The inn keeper questioned, when he realized Jaune was serious.

"Please, I understand it's weird, but this is really serious. I NEED to know." Jaune pleaded earnestly.

The inn keeper seemed to sense that he was being genuine, and, despite quite obviously finding it ridiculous, he answered.

"She's a girl, a bit shorter than you are, with short light green hair and dark skin. She had two customized handguns for her weapons, if you're wondering."

Jaune had fallen silent, looking down.

"... thank you." He said.

"Sure. Are you alright?" The inn keeper questioned.

"I'm fine." Jaune assured him, despite him being a few seconds from screaming hysterically. "I just need a bit of time to myself."

He turned, walking away as the inn keeper watched after him.

He watched the blonde go to a nearby trash can outside, staring down into it, before falling to his knees, grasping the rim and yelling into it as loudly as possible, several passerby staring at him, but not questioning him.

Jaune then rose back to his feet, walking inside without addressing the confused expression of the inn keeper, who obviously wanted to understand why the blonde knight felt the overwhelming need to yell into a trash can.

"Do you know if there's any way to get into contact with Haven Academy?" Jaune asked.

"Not since Beacon tower fell." The man replied. "Did you need something from there?"

"I just wanted to get a message out there. But I guess that's a lost cause too."

He said this with a weary tone, and the inn keeper was beginning to feel baffled by the extremity of the emotions being displayed then.

"Do you need directions to get there?"

"Maybe." Jaune looked up. "Can you tell me how long of a walk it would be?"

Upon getting the answer, he became pensive.

"Thank you."

As Jaune walked away, wondering how best to go about his next immediate action, he thought of whether or not it would be best to make a run for it then.

Would he be able to make it all the way there before they realized anything?

His lack of weapons made this question all the more poignant; he doubted he stood much of a chance of surviving with his weapons, if they attacked him, much less without them.

He weighed the options, then rose to his feet, walking towards the counter again.

"Excuse me, could I ask for a favor?" Jaune asked the inn keeper.

"What do you need?" He asked him.

"I'm about to head out for now. But if my wife asks, could you not tell her where I've gone?"

"Keeping secrets already?"

"No, it's just... Something I have to take care of. I don't want her to worry too much about me."

"What ARE you going to do?"

Jaune questioning him about his weapons, in addition to this description, made him curious and concerned at once.

"Just going to check in with a few friends." Jaune assured him. "Can you promise not to tell her though?"

The inn keeper gave him a hard look, but nodded.

"I'll just say you stepped out. I don't know where you're going anyways." He shrugged.

"Thank you." Jaune said gratefully, so much so the inn keeper's concern grew.

What was going on with this kid all of a sudden? he thought.

Jaune turned, walking out of the inn.

Then, after going down a few blocks, while giving a few looks back to the inn in question, he faced forward and started to run, following the directions given to him as best he could as his heart raced.

* * *

He didn't know how many minutes passed, before he finally arrived at Haven, out of breath and sweating slightly, but for a moment, it didn't matter to him as he returned to the campus grounds.

The emptiness of the academy normally made for an eerily silent environment, but it had become a home away from home for him, the familiar hallways leading him to the living room where everyone often talked to one another.

There was the sound of people talking, his friends, and Jaune stopped before the door.

"Guys?" He called uncertainly, and the chatter stopped, only for the door to whip open after a few seconds.

At the sight of Jaune there, safe and sound, Nora gasped, then leapt forward to tightly hug the blonde, making him stumble back as she rubbed her head against his chest plate.

"Jaune, you're okay!" She cried, Ren not far behind as he looked to Jaune in surprise that turned into relief.

Jaune, overcoming his own surprise, could only hug her back, the mental and physical exhaustion he felt catching up to him as he felt the warmth and safety of being with his team and friends again.

Then came the obvious question.

"Where have you BEEN?" Ruby questioned as she came to the door as well.

"... Where do I even start?" Jaune wondered to himself.

* * *

After settling down and gathering everyone in the kitchen, Jaune tried to bring them all up to speed.

"I know you tried drinking for the first time, but what happened after that?" Ren questioned.

"I drank enough that I don't actually remember anything." Jaune answered. "When I woke up the next morning though, I... I woke learning I'd gotten married the night before."

This made everyone stare at him with surprise.

"You got MARRIED?" Nora questioned. "To who? Was that who you were with all this time?"

"Uh... Yeah." Jaune crossed his arms, feeling a knot in his stomach as he thought back to how Emerald had made him think he'd married to Weiss, and later Yang.

As said women looked to him from beyond the counter, he resolved that he would take this information to the grave.

"Who was it though?" Nora asked, curious and smiling supportively. "I mean, I'm sure it might have been awkward at first, but you got her name at least, right?"

"... Yeah." Jaune hung his head, mentally bracing himself.

Reading his expression, Nora shared a look with Ren, smile dropping with mild concern.

"Well, what IS her name?" Yang said. "Or... IS it a her?"

"It's a her." Jaune answered.

"Alright, just checking," the blonde huntress crossed her arms over the kitchen counter, "so... what's her name then?"

Jaune took a deep breath, then told them.

It took several long, heavy seconds for them to properly register the information.

"Emerald?" Ruby finally questioned, not believing it fully. "The... Same Emerald that ran off with Cinder?"

"What other Emerald is there?" Weiss questioned the hooded girl.

"I don't know, there are other Rubys out there too, I can't see why Emeralds should be any more rare!" Ruby exclaimed.

"It's the same Emerald." Jaune held his hand in his face, face red with embarrassment as he tried thinking of the last couple days of his life with the understanding that it had been Emerald.

"How did it even GET to that point?" Yang asked, baffled. "I know you were drunk, but was SHE drunk?"

"She was. We had a wedding ceremony with a mob boss and a priest he was close to." Jaune said, distraught.

"A mob boss?" Weiss perked up. "How did you get involved with a mob boss?"

Jaune explained to them, as best as he could, what had happened from his, hopefully, menially warped understanding of the things that had taken place.

"- and after things calmed down, the mob boss heard what I did it all for, and since I won him a lot of money, he decided to let us get married and worry about the consequences later on." Jaune finished.

"But then... What did you do, when you woke up the next morning?" Ren asked.

"That part I'm still a bit iffy about. It's hard to explain, but... I think Emerald has some way to alter her appearance, or something like that. I didn't realize who she was until we came back, after hearing everything I told you."

"I think it's her semblance." Ruby pitched in, and everyone looked to her. "When we were fighting before, I remember her making me see some kind of vision of Cinder attacking me. But when I hit her, it was just that, a vision that wasn't there. And then there's Yang not seeing Emerald right beside her until it was too late before, when she first escaped with Cinder."

Yang lowered her head in thought.

"There was definitely something like that going on before. Times where there were suddenly four or five different Mercurys attacking me, but they'd just disappear when I hit some of them."

Her mind hearkened back to the Vytal tournament finals as this crossed her mind.

She had been so certain that Mercury had attacked her that day, when she'd beaten him, but no one else had seen what she had.

All they saw was her attacking him, unprovoked.

With this line of understanding, she began to ponder if Emerald had been responsible for that.

"That would explain how she looked like someone completely different." Jaune replied, bringing Yang out of her thoughts.

"What made you realize it was Emerald?" Blake asked.

"I heard her arguing with Cinder, in the room next to ours. I didn't realize it right then, but that was what led to me figuring it out. When I went down to try grabbing my weapons from the inn keeper, he said that Emerald had come to get them. He didn't mention her by name, but he described her appearance enough for me to know. The last I checked, they were still talking, but I didn't know what to do. My scroll was gone, and I had no idea where my weapons were. So... I just ran all the way back here, hoping for the best."

"... How long ago was that?" Yang questioned.

"Probably long enough for them to know I'm gone." Jaune admitted.

"Well. This has been a heavy couple of days." Nora sighed.

"What do you mean? What happened while I was gone?" Jaune asked, made curious and concerned.

"Did you know there were jellyfish Grimm?" Yang asked.

"No...?"

"We didn't either. We had a bit of a scare, when I woke up with one hovering over me in my sleep yesterday."

"Really?" Jaune asked, surprised.

"It looked so weird and creepy, floating inside our room like that." Weiss shook her head.

"It didn't even try attacking us, it was just tearing up the room looking for something. It tried taking Yang's robot arm." Ruby said.

"That thing is still roaming around the halls." Blake added grimly. "We managed to get her arm back, but we've set up a watch after that."

"Oh no... What do Qrow and Ozpin say about that?" Jaune asked.

"Qrow... he had to leave." Ruby answered.

"Huh? Why?" Jaune asked.

"I got the Relic, and Ozpin told Qrow we needed to bring it to Atlas." Yang explained. "Qrow wanted to let us rest before we did anything else... But then waves of Grimm suddenly showed up and started attacking."

"They were really invested in attacking whatever building the lamp was inside of, and the attacks only stopped when Qrow got on a plane and flew off. He didn't know if that would work, but it did." Weiss added. "That was yesterday morning."

"Then we tried looking for you, but we didn't know where to look, after the bar you went to. The bar itself was closed when we found it." Ruby concluded.

"... I'm so sorry. We'd probably be gone right now if it wasn't for me." Jaune said, greatly regretting his decision to drink.

"This has been a hectic week in general so far." Yang told him. "Professor Lionheart died a couple days ago, on top of him being a spy. Then add in everything else we've told you. We're all just having a bad few days."

* * *

Many, many miles away from Haven, one Qrow Branwen walked along a trail while carrying the Relic, after he'd convinced his plane pilot walking was the safer method of going about his journey for all parties involved.

(After getting attacked by Nevermores for the third time, the pilot lost the will to give a rebuttal.)

Though Qrow felt life relished the act of screwing him over a bit TOO much at times, he had learned to accept it in most circumstances and make the most of the few pleasures offered to him.

This was no such time.

"First Ironwood riles everyone up during the Vytal Festival. Then Beacon tower gets knocked down. Then I spend a month tailing Ruby and her friends after Oz dies. Then Leo turns traitor and gets every Huntsman near Haven killed. And now I'm walking BACK from Haven to Atlas." He muttered to himself.

He looked to the sky for a long moment.

"You know, if any of you gods DO exist, I just want you to tell whoever gave ME bad luck, and Raven warp portals, they REALLY screwed their choices up. You'd think you all-knowing beings would REALIZE that before you screwed me, but apparently not."

He brought out his weapon, pointing it up to the sky.

"Do you have ANY idea how much less trouble this would be, if _I_ had Raven's power, and just put that connection thing on all the people in Ozpin's inner circle? I hope you THINK on that, all of ya. I could even keep everyone updated WITHOUT needing the towers up. But _nooo_. You, with your infinite powers and wisdom, decided that I should be gifted with bad luck. All of you got together for a "FUCK Creation" meeting, decided on how to screw over your all-time favorite FUCK toy, Qrow "Fuck Toy" Branwen, decide how you want to BEND me over to tear me a fifth asshole in this SHIT pool of a world! But you know what? I've got nothing but time. So EVERY asshole god of EVERY asshole mythology that wants a piece can come down now. I'll give YOU a taste of what it's like to get FUCKED by a force of nature, see how YOU like it!"

He doubted any gods would heed his anger filled ranting against them.

They never did.

Whether they didn't care about his grievances, were laughing like the assholes they were, or just found mild entertainment from it, his feelings had not changed since he'd realized just how much suffering he was in store for.

Qrow simply understood why having a semblance that forced him to have bad luck, in the simplest of terms, sucked.

* * *

"Hopefully things are going well with Uncle Qrow." Ruby said, trying to stay positive. "But what do we do about Cinder and Emerald? I don't know about Emerald, but we can't leave Cinder alone."

"It would be troublesome for Jaune without his weapons as well." Ren added, looking to the man in question. "What do you think?"

"I'm not sure. I definitely need my weapons, but would she actually GIVE them to me?" Jaune asked thoughtfully. "I don't know if I'm looking into it too much, but it almost sounded like Emerald did this on Cinder's orders. I don't know how much of it WAS her orders, but she's involved, as far as I can tell."

"We'd have to be careful then." Ren replied. "I can follow behind you, to give you back up if things go south."

"What would that mean for you though?" Jaune asked. "We would be in a second story room at an inn. It would be hard for you to be there if anything does happen."

"We can't just let you go alone though." Nora said, frowning at the prospect.

Jaune thought about it.

He began to ponder about the situation, the outlandish level of coincidence that led to him marrying Emerald.

Overall, knowing that it had been Emerald all along gave him a much needed explanation for his strange perspective on it all.

Thinking back on his past conversations with Emerald, under the guise of Weiss and Yang, all the minor discrepancies between them stuck out all the more to him, along with the one major question he'd been mulling over, of how Weiss somehow turned into Yang in the bathroom that day.

This particular detail made it all the more jarring for him, despite this.

Assuming there was a point to this entire thing for Emerald, Jaune could not fathom a conceivable reason as to why she'd suddenly switched impersonations.

He thought of it for a few moments more before looking to his friends again.

"We're going to go meet someone tomorrow morning. It won't be too far from the bar I went to." Jaune told them. "I think it'd be better if you guys rested for tonight, before heading over there in the morning. It's getting late as is, and you're all probably tired. I can strike it out alone again for now."

Ruby nodded, Ren looked hesitant, Nora sighing, the others processing this information before ultimately agreeing with him.

"We'll send some of us out when the time comes. Did they say what time Jaune?" Ruby asked.

Jaune blinked, trying to think back, but not remembering.

"No... But we'll still be going, eventually." Jaune told her. "We agreed to annul the marriage, once we realized we could do that, and even if Cinder is involved, I don't think she wants to fight."

As he said this, the words Emerald had spoken surfaced from his memory of what she had been saying to Cinder.

 _"I would do ANYTHING for you."_

He thought of the possibilities, and a chill ran down his spine.

"Are you sure about this?" Weiss asked.

"I am." Jaune nodded after a brief bit of hesitation, mentally hoping things wouldn't immediately go awry.

"Can you at least leave the address for us, so we know where to find you?"

"I can. Do you... Have a piece of paper?" Jaune said, remembering the names of the bar and the building he visited earlier.

When he had written it down, they spoke for a bit longer before some of them started walking Jaune as far as the town, for the sake of keeping him safe in case the Demon Jelly, as they dubbed the jellyfish Grimm, came and attacked him while he was defenseless.

As they reached the town, Jaune bid his companions goodbye, sharing a hug with Nora and Ren before they went their separate ways.

* * *

The trek back to the inn gave Jaune ample time to think, and while he initially thought about the current situation, his mind soon drifted onto Emerald as he wondered about the things she'd told him these past couple of days.

* * *

 _"This really reminds me of how things were back home." Jaune had said as he washed dishes with her, glancing over to the woman beside him and seeing her rolling up her sleeves._

 _"Home?"_

 _"Yeah. I have 7 sisters, so we'd always end up fighting over who had dish duty when the time came." He chuckled, smiling warmly as he recalled this._

 _She hummed, looking down thoughtfully at the dishes as she cleaned._

 _"It must be nice, having a home like that."_

 _"It is." Jaune said, oblivious to her feelings, thinking it simple small talk. "Sure, the days I spent with everyone traveling here was fun too, I see everyone as kind of like my second family, but… there's no place like home."_

 _"It really depends on your definition of "home" though." She answered half-mindedly._

 _"That's true too. But you at least think of us as a second family too, right?"_

 _She paused, before smiling bitterly at him._

 _"I wouldn't know the first thing about having a first family." She told him honestly. "So… Maybe. I can't say for certain."_

* * *

 _"I don't know how to explain it. But... I love you." Emerald said as she confessed to Cinder._

 _"How COULD you?" Cinder spat._

 _"I don't know how to explain it!" She repeated with exasperation. "Before I met you, I was just drifting along. Just - going through the motions, with no place to call home, no one to call family."_

* * *

Thinking on this, Jaune began to get something of an idea about Emerald's situation, the picture that began to form in his mind's eye not being the best.

Minutes passed, and the streets grew emptier, before Jaune finally neared the inn.

Stepping back inside, he became aware of his own weariness from having run so much before, but telling himself to keep up a facade for the sake of not letting Emerald realize he knew the truth.

As he walked past the inn keeper however, he paused, questioning him.

"Excuse me, but did she come down at all, if you remember?"

The man looked to him, then shook her head.

"I see. Thanks." Jaune looked up the stairs, climbing them as he tried to steady his nerves.

When he looked up to find Emerald there, standing near their door with her appearance altered to fit Yang's look, she was already looking back, having spotted him.

He froze for a brief moment, nervousness making him unsure of how to act, before he recovered, steeling himself as he looked to her.

Something about her felt off, that much he could sense, but he wasn't sure what.

He approached Emerald, asking, "Are you alright?"

"... I'm fine." She shook her head, though her voice was weary. "I just... need a moment to myself."

She opened the door without another word, Jaune watching her enter.

Part of him wished to question her, but he stopped himself, thinking it best not to.

Despite this, as the door closed, he registered how she looked and sounded so much like Yang to him, and it serve to baffle and creep him out simultaneously.

As the finality of the fact that he'd married an illusionist came, Jaune could not help his disbelieving utterance.

"... Of all the people to share my first binge drink with, and it ends up being _her_?"

* * *

Emerald walked along to the bathroom, locking the door behind her, before carrying herself over to the mirror before she loosened the dress, letting it fall as she stared at her body in the mirror.

She took in her appearance, of the many burnt, bruised and bleeding marks all along her body, before she turned, walking despite the pain movement caused her, her nauseous as she walked to the bath, running up a tub of cold water, her bracing herself before submerging most of her body into it, the burns stinging at first, but the pain racking through the burns soothed of their pain.

She gazed down at her body a moment more, remembering how she had gotten them, before she hugged knees to her chest, body shaking uncontrollably.

Tears welling up in her eyes, Emerald sobbed, burying her face into her knees with shame.

* * *

 **A/N:** This turned out larger than I expected.

The woes of writing a long chapter on your phone: You have to go back and italicize/bold the things you want that way.

I originally wanted to keep the thing with Qrow at the end, as an omake sort of thing, but I thought it clashed a bit too much with everything else at the end.

What essentially happened offscreen was what I envisioned happening after the Relic was taken; as everyone was worn out from all the fighting, Salem sends Grimm monsters to attack Haven the same night it happens.

They might have gotten the relic, but she won't let them take it without a fight (well, even more a fight).

What ensues is everyone that came from Menagerie, the reformed White Fang members, the police, and all the main characters still able to fight, duking it out for the rest of the night, while some other Grimm go off on their own and cause trouble (hence why the bartender got called out to help deal with it).

Amidst all of that fighting happening, it becomes obvious that the Grimm are attacking either the CCT Tower or whatever building happens to have the Relic inside it, and Qrow, deciding to risk it, strikes out with a few people on a plane with the Relic in hand, and the Grimm follow, before he goes out and slaughters the vast majority of them while they're doing that.

Despite that, back at Haven, Salem decides to try having Ol' Demon Jelly kill Oscar in his sleep, but Demon Jelly hides away until the time is right, since there are still Huntsmen that could overwhelm it if they know what it's doing.

Eventually, Demon Jelly believes it best to try stealing everyone's weapons, but ends up waking some of them in its hunt for the Huntsmen/Huntress loot, which included Yang's cybernetic arm, though they got their stuff back.

Now people are a bit on edge about walking around at Haven at night.

And that's the rundown of things that happened these last several chapters on team RNRWBY's side of things, beyond going out to search for Jaune a couple times.


	12. Dissociation

When Emerald heard a knock on the bathroom door a long while later, she looked up, blinking tears from her eyes as Jaune's voice spoke to her.

"Yang? Are you doing alright?"

Emerald looked down slowly.

She wanted to answer, but found herself unable to form the words.

Outside the door, Jaune frowned, a bit hesitant on the matter, before speaking again.

"Are you feeling hungry right now?" He asked, tone curious. "It's been a long time since we ate last. I can try seeing if there's anything I can order for you."

Emerald barely mustered up the energy to conjure an illusion for him.

"I'm not hungry." She had her illusion speak for him, though the tone remained emotionless.

Jaune gave a taken aback look, but decided, after a moment of thinking, not to press the issue.

"OK." He said, mentally sighing. "If there's anything you'd like help with, you can tell me."

When she didn't respond for a few moments, he relented and walked away from the door, sighing to himself.

* * *

Emerald later found herself wanting to leave the bathroom, but her only available article of clothing was Cinder's dress.

She stared down at the dress for several moments, a painful cluster of emotions writhing inside her, but her numb to it at that moment all the same.

She opened the closet door, seeing Jaune's weapon and shield-sheathe sitting in there, before promptly kicking the fabric inside and closing the door again, sighing heavily as she walked over and sat on the toilet, towel wrapped around her body as she hugged herself.

Activating her semblance, Emerald tried sensing if Jaune was nearby, finding him in the room still and looking out the window.

"Jaune?" She called.

He looked to the bathroom door, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah?" He asked, rising to his feet and walking over.

"Do you think you could buy me other clothes?"

He raised an eyebrow.

"I can _try_." He said, mentally wondering why she would have a need or want for clothes. "Do you need new ones?"

"Yeah. Pants and a shirt" Emerald said, sighing. "Do you know if that prize money that you got would be enough?"

"I can go see." Jaune answered. "Do you mind coming with me? I'm not sure what your size is."

"I'd... rather not." Emerald curled into herself. "But..."

Though her words seemed hesitant, Jaune felt as though something was wrong, somehow, though he couldn't figure out what exactly.

"It's fine. Don't worry." He found himself saying without thinking on it, turning to the door out of the room. "Just hang tight. I'll be back as soon as possible, see what could probably fit you."

"Thank you." She said, tone more grateful than she realized, but her perking up and adding more to her request hurriedly. "And... Jaune?"

"Yes?"

She looked to her the burn marks adorning her arm, then winced.

"Can you... buy me something long sleeved?"

His eyebrows furrowed.

"Are you sure?"

"Definitely."

"OK. I'll try seeing what I can do."

"Thanks again."

He gave a goodbye before leaving the room, and though Jaune wondered why she specified wanting a long sleeve shirt, when she seemed to wear pointedly sleeveless attire even when the Vytal Festival came around during the Fall, he decided to focus on one thing at a time.

This involved questioning the inn keeper on a subject gnawing at the back of his brain, with recent revelations about his and Emerald's drunken escapades fresh in mind.

"Excuse me?"

The inn keeper, at this point, had become patently worried about the blonde, yet seeing him again, he wanted to assume the best.

"Are you about to head out again?" He asked.

"I am. I wanted to ask you something first though." Jaune said.

"What did you want to know?"

"We came here with a dowry someone gave us, right?"

He paused, then nodded.

"Have you been using it to pay for the room we've been using?" Jaune asked.

"I have been."

"Why have we been doing dishwashing duty these past two days then?"

The inn keeper crossed his arms.

"It was an agreement your wife and I came to, before she left and came back in with you. She wasn't alone though. She came in with someone else, sayng that she didn't have any money to give, but that she'd do anything, if it meant getting her friend a place to rest. They had both been really hurt, but she refused to let me call a doctor. I agreed she could have a room with her, as long as she worked off the debt the next morning." The man glanced towards the door, recalling the events of the last couple nights. "I was a bit worried when she didn't come back for a long time, but while I was concerned that you both had to be brought back to me, drunk, by _mobsters_ no less, I was also disappointed, since she got drunk in the first place while her friend was recovering."

He shook his head, breathing a sigh while rubbing his head, Jaune looking down while processing this information, only for the man to get his attention again, with a question of his own.

"Can you at least tell me something, before you go?"

"What did you want to know?"

He looked up the staircase, Jaune following his gaze, seeming to ponder his words.

"Both of you are young, bound to make mistakes." He began, looking to him seriously. "So, just so I can rest easy... Have you two gotten caught up in something you can't get out of?"

Jaune's eyes widened at this question.

"If you have, I can try helping you all disappear, if you need to." He offered. "If it can't be smoothed over, I'm willing to help, however I can. You just need to say the word."

"I wouldn't say we're in trouble," Jaune stammered, "nothing like what you're probably imagining, at least."

"Do you need help though?" He stressed.

"I'm okay. We're... okay." Jaune corrected himself.

The innkeeper frowned at his hesitance, but didn't comment on it.

"You're asking about your dowry, right?" He asked.

Jaune nodded, and he left, coming back with the envelope.

"If you are in trouble, my offer still stands." The innkeeper told him. "Tell that other young lady too, will you?"

"I'll tell her." Jaune nodded.

"Alright. You have enough in there for another few days, anyhow. Are you two planning on staying here until it runs up?"

"I'd have to discuss it with her." Jaune said. "Hopefully it won't come to that. But could I ask you something else?"

"What do you need?"

Jaune questioned him on where he could find good clothing stores that were still open.

* * *

The sprint over there was not nearly as exhausting as the one to Haven Academy had been, but Jaune was glad to find he still had a small amount of time left before the stoe itself closed.

For once, Jaune felt glad for the numerous times he'd been volunteered to help carry his sister's bags for stores; throughout that routine, he had a gained a decent sense for what sizes fit others, though he was still iffy on picking out a sweater and pants for Emerald to wear.

Not helping matters was the question of whether or not he should keep up the façade of him not knowing that it was really Emerald under an illusion.

It made him hesitate, but ultimately, with time running low, he decided to pick clothes that would suit Emerald better, for the sake of efficiency, along with a belt, if, supposedly, he picked a pair of pants too big.

After paying the money to a tired looking, but still friendly, clerk, he jogged back to the inn, inwardly wondering about how much he'd been running today.

* * *

"Hey, uh... Yang?" Jaune asked as he came to the bathroom door of his room, breathing heavily.

Emerald perked her head up, "Jaune?"

"I got the clothes for you." Jaune said. "If it doesn't fit, then I'm willing to go back for you tomorrow. But do you think you can wear these for the night?"

The door opened slowly, Jaune seeing Yang's eye looking out to him.

"Were... you running?" She asked, surprised at his short breath and sweaty face.

"Y-Yeah." Jaune chuckled sheepishly, handing the bag over to her through the crack. "The stores were about to close when I got there, so I had to be fast. Sorry if the clothes aren't the best fit. But I tried looking into what I thought might look good on you."

"Oh... I'm sorry you had to go to all that trouble." She said, frowning with guilt as she took the bag. "I didn't know, honest."

"It's okay, don't worry. I needed the workout anyways." Jaune replied with a joking smile.

"Thanks... I'll put them on now." She said, closing the door, Jaune turning and walking to the bed, sitting down as he looked up the ceiling.

It didn't take long for the door to open, him looking to find Yang standing there in the clothes he'd picked out for her.

"Thanks again for this." She said, adjusting her shirt on herself.

"I'm glad to help." Jaune answered, standing back up. "Does it fit you well?"

"It does." She nodded curtly, before glancing to the door. "Did you ever get a chance to eat?"

"Not yet."

"Do you want to go out to eat?" She said.

"Are you hungry now?" Jaune asked, raising an eyebrow.

"I..."

Trailing off, she looked down a bit, before breathing a sigh.

"... honestly, I just want to get away from here." She told him honestly, a hand running up the length of her upper arm, Emerald wincing beneath her illusion.

"That's fine." Jaune said, trying to keep the wariness out of his expression. "We don't need to go out for a reason though. I don't think the places are even open this late anyways."

"I see."

"Do you... REALLY want to go out though?" Jaune asked. "I know you said you wanted to, but is there something important that you have to do?"

"No." She shook her head.

"If that's what you want to do, I'd be willing. Fresh air never hurt anyone. Unless you'd rather be alone." He answered.

He watched her expression, how she pondered it briefly, then finally answered.

"I'm- I'm not sure." She admitted. "But would you be okay, walking with me?"

He hesitated for a brief moment, wondering if this was another trick or not, before deciding to go with his gut.

"Do you have any idea where you wanted to walk to?"

"Not really."

"Alright." Jaune nodded, deciding to believe her. "I think we should try keeping away from bars though. That's reasonable, right?" He asked jokingly.

She tried forcing to laugh, but it didn't come out naturally, and Jaune frowned, running a hand through his hair.

"Ready to go now?" He wondered.

"Yeah."

* * *

Walking along the area, they moved around for a long period of time before they situated themselves on a bench, somewhere Jaune was certain was on the other side of town.

As expected, most of the restaurants were closed.

As with the walk, the silence between the pair was notable, though Jaune never pointed it out.

When Emerald finally broached a subject however, the subject in question caught him by surprise.

"What would you do, if you knew someone was working with Cinder?"

He looked to her, eyes widened, but her gaze was downcast.

"Huh?"

She looked up to him slowly, seemingly hesitant before speaking.

"If you met someone, and you found out they worked with Cinder - even after everything she did - what would you do?"

Though Jaune understood this much, he was more baffled by her asking such a question, if he was assuming she hadn't figured out that he knew the truth.

This assumption turned to anxiety as he pondered if she DID know, somehow, but he tried to envision how he'd genuinely react, if it had been Yang asking this, and answered as such.

"Are you talking about Raven?" He asked, with feigned uncertainty.

She glanced away.

"Anyone in general, really."

"I'm not sure." Jaune answered honestly. "I don't know what I'd do then."

"Why is it that you hate Cinder?" She asked, no malice or undercurrent of confusion in her tone, simply curiosity.

He frowned, then looked forward.

"Are you really asking me that?" He wondered.

Reading his tone, she paused.

"I'm sorry." She sighed. "Just... curious."

He decided, ultimately, to humor her.

"Beyond her killing Pyrrha? Or her dragging her and Yang's reputations through the mud for her plan, make them out to be monsters? She's... just a terrible person." He explained bluntly. "People were dying, and she just gloated about all of it. No one deserved what happened to them that day. But while SHE'S still alive, good, innocent people were killed, because of her. And she doesn't care."

She winced.

"So... Knowing that, you tried killing her?"

"Yes." He nodded slowly.

She fell silent for a moment.

"What if someone else was responsible too?" She elaborated, him looking at her, seeing her eyes on him. "What if THEY caused all of that death and destructon, knowing it would turn out the way it did? Would you kill them too? Like... say Emerald, for example."

He stared at her for a moment, noting the minor shift in her tone, but it seeming, against all reason, hopeful.

He struggled to understand the reasoning behind her questioning him on this matter, but tried to maintain the façade all the same.

"If... if she was someone, JUST as terrible as Cinder, or if other lives were on the line... I think I would, if I had an actual chance." He answered.

For the first time since he'd come back from Haven, he saw the ghost of a smile cross her face.

"Alright." She nodded, looking down again, silent once more.

It took several minutes more, before it finally happened, but when Jaune saw the illusion masking Emerald as Yang suddenly dissipate and show the girl next to him, his heart stopped.

Looking at her, he silently wondered if she had been planning to drop the ball like this, and his eyes flickered towards her waist, pausing as she slumped over slowly.

He then instinctively caught her before she fell over, and it was with this that Jaune finally realized she'd fallen asleep.

This did little to ease his worries, but after a moment, he decided to check her person for her weapons, finding neither.

She only slept peacefully while leaning against him, and he sighed and looked about.

Her sleep grew restless as the night went on however, shifting and talking in her rest, before, quite suddenly, she jerked awake with a loud scream, holding her head as yelled repeatedly, Jaune so startled that he wasn't sure what to do for several seconds before he pressed his hands on Emerald's shoulders.

"You're okay," Jaune said, rubbing her shoulders as the woman's night terror reached a peak, "you're okay Emerald!"

Her shrieking ceased after about half a minute, and Jaune held her as she tried laying back down.

"Are... Are you okay?"

Jaune looked up to find a woman standing nearby with a concerned look.

"Y-Yeah, my wife just has night terrors." Jaune lied, speaking quickly. "She had one yesterday too, sorry about this."

"No reason to apologize, but..." She stopped, then nodded, walking away and leaving Jaune to his own devices after a moment, during which he sighed.

"How do I explain this to her?" Jaune asked while laying Emerald on his lap.

By the time she awoke, he lacked any answers.

* * *

A/N: Going back to the whole choice thing, I kind of wanted to have little things like picking out clothes for Emerald or for Yang to be choices, along with other things, but I've already got enough planned out as is, so meh.

I was originally going to describe Emerald's dream too, but I'm not sure whether to actually put it in or not.

The entire thing was meant to be Emerald having a nightmare of Cinder again, pertaining to... _recent_ events in this route of the story.

The problem is, while the other dream was short and to the point, this one... Kind of got long, and was a bit wacky (it involved a rat that talks to people through radios that has a Red Cross tattoo and healing powers, among other dream symbolism stuff - thank you Dream Moods).

Anyways, the backstory behind the whole thing with Jaune is meant to be because one of his little sisters had night terrors often.

His mind correlated it with Emerald because, while she didn't have a night terror in the bathroom after night 1, she still started screaming repeatedly while in the bathroom.

(Just me being overly detailed though.)

Thankfully, we're finally reaching the last hurtles of this story. Til then.


	13. Burns

The first thing Emerald realized was that, save for the raincoat she wore, she walked along a red carpet without any idea of where it lead to.

All around her, rain fell, and she supposed it was something to help get her out of the rain.

At the end of the carpet, thankfully, was a ramp leading her inside a small structure, her finding a small room with an open closet and windows, while a small white rat sat next to a radio on a table.

"You seem new here." A voice spoke from the radio, tone pleasantly surprised, Emerald pausing as the rat looked up at her with beady eyes. "Are you okay, Miss?"

Etched onto its fur was a red cross, and though she neared the rat, it didn't scamper away.

"I can help if you want me to. I'm a healing rat." The voice on the radio spoke merrily.

"... You... talk through a _radio_?" She asked, her reaching up and scratching at her wrist, at a rash situated there.

"You shouldn't scratch at something like that." The rat ignored her, hopping down from the radio and peering at her rash for a closer look. "It might make it worse. I don't think it'll be permanent though. I think it'll even heal over, with the right kind of treatment."

She frowned.

"I'd rather not take advice from a talking rat." Emerald said, looking to the window.

It was pouring rain outside, and the rat ran over to the windowsill a second later.

"Maybe we can watch the rain together. It's really calming." The rat kept speaking anyhow.

"How does this radio even work?" Emerald asked.

"I'm just the healing rat. I don't know how I talk through my radio, it just lets me."

Emerald turned to the radio itself, then tuned it to a different channel, curious.

"Curious, aren't you?" A new voice spoke, and the rat jumped up in place, Emerald freezing up.

The self-proclaimed healing rat darted over desperately, garbled static flooding the room as it squealed frantically, trying to retune the radio to the right channel.

"Don't do that!" The healing rat yelled fearfully once it did so, Emerald taking a step away.

"What... Why?" Emerald asked.

"Bad things happen when you do that!" It said.

"Alright." She said, taking a step away as she looked back to the only other thing in the small room, a closet filled with various clothes.

Curious, she stepped closer to look at them, pulling hangers along the rack.

It took her a moment of looking before she found something that made her freeze: a red dress, with golden engravings lining the sleeves and chest area.

The engravings lit up, a pair of golden eyes opening up against the inside of the dark closet, staring at her.

Eyes widening, Emerald felt a sharp but intense sensation of heat shooting through her arm, her flinching away with a shriek as she stumbled back, an invisible force suddenly pulling the dress off of the hanger.

Immediately, she was struck with the need to leave, her terror stricken body carrying her feet towards the ramp she took to enter, only for a hand to suddenly grasp her calf mid-step, violently pulling her back as she fell, catching herself on her hands, but not dating to look back at her assailant as she tried reaching up the ramp to flee, but the hand grasping her leg relentlessly pulling her back.

Desperate, she looked back, trying to kick at something, anything, to get it off of her, but she only kicked at empty air, her writhing body getting dragged back down the ramp before she looked up, seeing the pair of disembodied golden eyes gazing down over her before narrowing with impish delight.

"No- please, stop-"

The creature's unseen hand grasped over her mouth, silencing her as it floated down over her, struggling still until, finally, her body could only slump over from exhaustion.

By that point, it had coated itself into her entire body, and, not a second after her struggle ended, flames burst out, slathering and burning into her body.

* * *

She snapped up, screaming aloud as she woke with a cold sweat, the sounds of her own voice being almost enough to drown out the sound of the person next to her.

"You're okay," they said, grasping her shoulders, "you're okay Emerald!"

She instinctively flinched away from him, trying to get away, before she stopped, the person holding her maneuvering her before laying her down so she laid her head against her lap.

It took several moments before she finally felt herself slipping back into sleep.

When she awoke, Emerald groaned, slowly sitting up in place as she found herself laying down on someone on a bench.

Sluggish, she sat up slowly, only to look up to find she'd been laying on Jaune's lap, her eyes widening before she flinched away, his eyes widening at her surprise.

"Uh... I... I can explain, I think?" Jaune said awkwardly.

"What are you talking about?" She asked, holding her head.

"You wanted to get away from the hotel, and we ended up sleeping on this bench." Jaune answered. "Did you rest okay? You aren't hurt, are you?"

"I..." She looked down at herself, seeing her uncharacteristic attire, the memories of the night before flooding back to her mind. "... I'm okay."

She wanted to question why he wasn't more surprised by her being there, but, ultimately, decided it didn't matter.

At least this way, she didn't have to constantly alter his senses.

"Do you... need a minute to yourself?" Jaune asked, concerned.

"I'm fine." She shook her head. "We're supposed to be headed for that Rosario guy's office again, right?"

"Yeah." Jaune nodded. "Should we get going now then?"

She nodded curtly, standing up.

* * *

As with the night prior to them finding a lone bench, Jaune took note of how silent Emerald was, but kept his concerns to himself, still unsure, even then, what to make of their current situation.

When they reached their destination, they went about getting an audience with Rosario again, with the man having the annulment paperwork finished and accounted for, sans their signatures and the like.

"I'll leave you to read over these, make sure you know what you're signing." Rosario told the pair, Jaune noting that the man brought them to what could be considered a break room, the papers on a table. "Once you do, I'll come back and take these papers."

"Thanks again for this." Jaune said gratefully, to which the elderly man nodded.

"Don't mention it."

As he said this however, he glanced over to Emerald, who stood with something of a focused expression on her face.

"That sweater looks nice on you." He complimented the girl, who looked up to him.

"Thank you." She said slowly, arms crossing, the motion awkward. "Jaune bought it for me yesterday."

"I thought it might look good on you." Jaune rubbed his scalp sheepishly.

"That's nice. It's a shame you two decided to end it." Rosario commented. "But the decision is yours. Before you leave though, could I talk to you in private, Emerald?"

She looked to him, wariness welling up inside her, even as she nodded a moment later, following after Rosario through another door that led to a sitting area, Jaune watching after them and looking to the window close to them, seeing Ren on a tree branch there and waving.

A greater sense of safety washed through him as he saw they were able to make it there.

In contrast, Emerald had rarely ever felt more on edge, looking at the back of Rosario's head as he led her inside and closed the door behind him.

"I take it things have been going well, these past few days?" He asked, keeping a cordial tone and expression as he glanced to Emerald from his peripheral, the girl needing a moment to respond.

"It's been fine." She said airily, Rosario giving a look to her briefly before looking to a table situated there.

"I'm glad to hear it. If I could say though, you seem a bit... different today." He pointed out, looking fully back at her. "Did something happen?"

Externally, the woman looked neutral at this question.

Internally, however, the memory of the events of the night before made her instinctively stiffen.

"I'm fine." She answered shortly, crossing her arms more tightly than before, though this motion made her arm, recovering from its previous tortures, ache from the wounds.

"I see." He didn't lose patience, but kept prodding the subject he had brought her in for. "What about your roommate?"

Emerald saw him as he gave her a guarded, cautious look, and anger welled up in her.

"Why do you care?" She asked.

"You seemed to have a lot of problems crop up because of her, near as I can tell." He responded. "Of course, that could just have been the alcohol talking, but I'm a bit concerned."

Rosario glanced down at Emerald's arm, and she frowned.

"I'll be blunt - I know you've been burnt." He said, matter-of-factly, looking along her arm, then the rest of her body. "There are plenty of second degree burns, but there are even more third degree ones. While I obviously can't do much about third degree burns, I can at least give you something for the second degree ones."

Emerald gave a surprised, then confused, reaction to this.

"... How do you...?"

"It's a... family semblance." Rosario answered, wearily. "I can see a person's body structure, and how much functioning muscle or bones they have, along with any parts of the body that're sensitive, be it to pain, pleasure, the works. It's useful for when someone gets hurt. I can tell exactly how fit they are to fight. Beyond that, I have other uses for it. But I'll leave that to your imagination."

Emerald watched as he walked away, going to a cabinet and pulling a vial out, returning with some ointment.

"I can't in good conscience let you leave in this state. At least tend to your wounds a bit."

Emerald looked to her arm, then back to him.

"So you see... ALL of my burns?"

"It's more like I sense all of them." He replied. "If you'd rather apply this yourself, be my guest. I'll go about getting a wet sponge."

"Thanks." She said softly, her exhaustion becoming clear on her face as she took the ointment from him.

"Did you put on any bandaging?"

"No."

"I'll get some for you then." He decided, walking off to get the supplies.

* * *

After several minutes of waiting - wherein Jaune had begun to feel curious, and later concerned - Rosario came stepping out with a grim expression on his face.

"Is everything alright?" Jaune asked as he stood up from the seat he'd made.

"I have to ask this, first and foremost: Did you know about all the burns she had?"

Jaune's eyes widened.

"Burns?"

"There are at least 30 of them, some more severe than others." He told him. "They weren't there when you two left last night, so I'd like to know, how did she get them?"

As Jaune processed these words, his bafflement grew to become confused horror, him wondering just what sort of things had happened when he'd left for Haven the night before.

"I'm not sure. I wasn't there with her when it happened. I knew she was acting strange yesterday, but this..."

"You bought her new clothes, ones that would cover her wounds, but you really didn't know how hurt she was?"

"I didn't, honestly." Jaune answered at his skeptic voice.

Rosario gave him a hard look, then sighed.

"Do you know who it was that did this to her?" He asked.

"I have an idea, but... Even if I'm right, I'm not sure what to do about her."

"I don't know what sort of relationship it is you two have right now, but if you can identify them, it'd be helpful. Most times, people burned as bad as her would need surgery. The problem is, there are so many burn areas that it might not even be possible for her." Rosario glanced to the door. "She doesn't have any medical insurance, on top of that, so it would be expensive to get her that sort of treatment."

The knight-in-training winced.

"What is she doing now?" Jaune asked.

"Putting some bandages on the burns. I gave her some ointment for it too."

"I can heal her with my semblance." Jaune said. "Can I go in to see her?"

"A healing semblance?" Rosario quirked an eyebrow. "Do you know how it works, exactly?"

"I pass my aura onto other people, and the boost in aura helps them heal... I think."

Rosario seemed to think on it.

"People tend to heal faster, when their aura levels are high enough. But I'm not sure if that would be advisable or not at this point, given the nature of the burns."

"I see." Jaune looked down.

"This is as far as it goes for how much I can help you, I'm afraid. Even WITH insurance, there's no possible way to treat burns THIS numerous, financially speaking."

Impulsively letting his empathy move him to speak, Jaune asked, "How much would surgery like that even cost, without insurance?"

"Just for ONE burn it'd cost..."

Jaune listened to the Lien amount, and, upon hearing it, he balked in horror.

"And that's assuming there isn't any scarring, infections, or anything else to treat." Rosario elaborated grimly. "And she has SEVERAL burns."

Jaune looked down, closing his eyes.

"Thank you for all your help so far."

"Don't mention it. Just... Take care of yourselves, you hear?"

With this, Rosario walked away, leaving Jaune to his own devices.

He glanced towards a nearby window, seeing Ren crouched on a tree branch with Nora, the latter waving to him.

Looking around, listening to see if he could hear Emerald or Rosario nearby, he stepped up to the window.

Immediately seeing they'd gotten his attention, Ren started to send hand signals over to Jaune then.

In moments, the pair communicated with basic sign language to get an idea of what the plan was.

* * *

It took several minutes more for Emerald to walk out, red eyes downcast, as Jaune stood waiting for her.

"Emerald?"

Looking up to see him still there, she frowned, but said nothing.

Pausing for a moment, Jaune rubbed his head.

"If you wouldn't mind it... Could I treat you to something to eat?" He offered, tone unsure yet hopeful.

Emerald gazed at him for a few moments, then looked down again.

"I'm not really hungry."

"Have you eaten at all though, these past couple of days?"

"Not really."

The shortness of her responses had concerned him before, and still did then, but knowing the circumstances of all her burns, he didn't pry.

"Would you like to at least take a walk with me for a while?" Jaune smiled faintly.

She looked up at him slowly, moving to cross her arms, but stopping, expression flickering with pain, letting her arms fall back down.

She considered it, then questioned it.

"Wouldn't you rather go back, to get your weapons?"

"Well, you know where they are, right? There's no real need to rush. I can't imagine you want to be anywhere around there right now." Jaune mused, and though Emerald looked at him with something akin to suspicion of how much he knew, she stiffened instinctively at the prospect of going back.

She didn't reject the chance to put space between herself and Cinder.

"I can probably do with something small."

* * *

A/N: It's surprising just how long it took me to actually post this.

For a while, I've been mulling over all the things I wanted to put in, but I think this is enough.

I'll try to be faster about this though. My quota was one chapter a month, at least, but... Welp.


End file.
